Perceived Audio Quality for Streaming Stereo Music

By Andrew Hines, Eoin Gillen, Damien Kelly, Jan Skoglund, Anil C. Kokaram, Naomi Harte. 2014

14 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Users of audio-visual streaming services expect an ever increasing quality of experience. Channel bandwidth remains a bottleneck commonly addressed with lossy compression schemes for both the video and audio streams. Anecdotal evidence suggests a strongly perceived link between bit rate and quality. This paper presents three audio quality listening experiments using the ITU MUSHRA methodology to assess a number of audio codecs typically used by streaming services. They were assessed for a range of bit rates using three presentation modes: consumer and studio quality headphones and loudspeakers. Our results indicate that with consumer quality headphones, listeners were not differentiating between codecs with bit rates greater than 48 kb/s (p>=0.228). For studio quality headphones and loudspeakers aac-lc at 128 kb/s and higher was differentiated over other codecs (p<=0.001). The results provide insights into quality of experience that will guide future development of objective audio quality metrics.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Mechanics, Signal Processing

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Citations in the corpus

ViSQOL v3: An Open Source Production Ready Objective Speech and Audio Metric (2020, background): “3 can produce a wideband signal at 9 kbps, whereas the TCDAudio14 [21], CoreSV14 [22], and AACvOpus15 [19] datasets that ViSQOL’s support vector regression was trained on have bitrates that only go as low as 24 kbps.”
Objective Assessment of Perceptual Audio Quality Using ViSQOLAudio (2017, methodology): “audio output from codecs is not uniform for all musical sounds [5].”
Bitrate classification of twice-encoded audio using objective quality features (2016, methodology): “Experiments have shown that the perceived quality for a given treatment (bitrate and codec) can vary depending on the content of the audio sample [2].”