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Audio

Can sound quality be measured?

Can sound quality be measured?

Are audio measurements irrelevant?
Can measurement be used by consumers to make informed choices about what to
buy?

by

Steve Guttenberg

@AudiophiliacMan

October 1, 2011
10:16 AM PDT

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comments

Is this what good
sound looks like?
Brent Butterworth

I've met a lot of audio designers in my time, and all of the best ones have
one thing in common, they have great "ears." They know what good sound sounds
like. The opposite camp is populated with engineers that rely exclusively on
measurements to "prove" their designs are better. To my way of thinking, the
second group rarely makes great sounding products. Audio is too complex to be
analyzed with just numbers alone.

Nowadays I'm meeting more digital audio engineers specializing in designing
room and speaker correction software. They are usually very nice people, and
their graphs and tests always look impressive on their laptops, but the presentations fall apart when I
listen to their sound. Results vary from not bad to truly horrendous, but great
sound is the least likely end product of their hard work.

Apparently, they were so focused on measuring sound they forgot to listen, or
hire someone who actually knows what good sound sounds like. If the goal was to
achieve better measurements I'd congratulate them for their accomplishments. But
it's not, and discovering exactly what types of measurements indicate improved
sound quality is an art. An art few of these engineers have mastered.

There are a couple of reasons why measurements fail to correlate with
subjective sound quality assessments. First, electronics and speaker
measurements have little to do with the sound of music. Test tones are too
simple and predictable; music is far more complex and random. Reproducing the
sound of a violin or a drum kit are exceedingly difficult tasks, and since the
real goal of any hi-fi is to play music and not test tones, the designer's first
priority should be making products that sound "good" for the intended market.
For example, if you're designing DJ headphones, you aren't trying to deliver the most
accurate bass. Far from it, you want to pump up the bass. Amplifier designers
shouldn't waste their time trying to create an amp to drive simple test loads,
they need to make an amp that handles the complexities associated with real
speakers playing music. And amplifier designers don't know which speakers are
going to be used with their amps. Every speaker presents a different type of
"load" to the amp.

In the 1970s there was a big push to lower the "total harmonic distortion"
specifications of amplifiers to ever lower levels, based on the belief that if
they measured better they would sound better. They were measuring the wrong
things. The narrow focus of designing for measurements rarely produces bona-fide
sonic improvements. That's not to say that in the hands of truly talented
engineers measurements aren't useful, they absolutely are, but measurements are
no substitute for listening.

I've heard all of the latest auto setup and calibration systems featured in
Denon, Onkyo, Pioneer, Sony, and Yamaha receivers, and the results are hit or
miss. Granted, these systems can improve the sound, but more often than not, the
processing merely changes the sound. In those cases, I can achieve better
results by listening and making adjustments with the manual speaker setup. The
processed sound might measure better, but again, that doesn't necessarily
correlate to sound quality enhancement.

I recently discussed the measurement quandary with my friend, writer Brent Butterworth, who
believes measurements are useful tools, but we never came to a meeting of minds
on this matter. I'm paraphrasing here, but he said that measurements that reveal
flaws in the sound of a speaker might go unnoticed by the ear, and that some
speakers that don't measure well, can still sound subjectively good. So there
you have it.

So if trained engineers struggle to derive useful information from
measurements, I can't imagine how consumers looking at a wiggly line on a chart
helps them decide which amp or speaker to buy. I'm not referring to
specifications or numbers like watts per channel or driver sizes; I'm talking
about charts and graphs that plot "spectrum of 1 kHz sinewave, D.C. to 1 kHz,"
or "anechoic response of tweeter on axis." If you have ever picked up useful
information from peering at charts in audio reviews, and you're not an engineer,
please share your insights in the Comments section.

Tags:

The Audiophiliac

Audio

About the author

Steve
Guttenberg

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Ex-movie theater
projectionist Steve Guttenberg has also worked as a high-end audio salesman, and
as a record producer. Steve currently reviews audio products for CNET and works
as a freelance writer for Home Theater, Inner Fidelity, Tone Audio, and
Stereophile.

See full bio

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