Influence of visual stimuli in the sound quality evaluation of loudspeaker systems

There is currently an increasing demand to evaluate sound quality attributes of products and to understand to what extent they influence a user’s overall impression, since there is usually more than one modality stimulating this evaluation. The present study uses loudspeakers as an example and evaluates the overall impression in relation to hearing and vision. In order to quantify the bias that the image of a loudspeaker has on the sound quality evaluation done by a naive listening panel, loudspeaker sounds of varied degradation are coupled with positively or negatively biasing visual input of real loudspeakers, and in a separate experiment by pictures of the same loudspeakers. In order to choose loudspeakers that provide a sufficient range of visual bias a preliminary visual-only experiment has been conducted. From the ongoing experiments it is possible to evaluate how much the auditory perception of a loudspeaker can be biased from visual input and study how the two modalities interact. Results from the experiments are presented.