Design of Psychometric Tests for the Evaluation of Audio Coding

The present paper focuses on the description of some subjective psychoacoustic evaluation of some chosen audio coding technologies by a set of psychometric methods. Key parts for the test implementation are the suitable selection of critical signals, testing methodologies and listeners in order to perform an effective test. Based on theoretical and experimental issues from psychoacoustics, the author tries to design and implement a set of tests, which output can be interpreted as the Quality of Service of a given compression algorithm. Three psychometric methods are applied. The Constant method, the pair comparison, and DBTS (Double-Blind Triple-Stimulus with hidden reference) method, recommended by the ITU-BS 1117. Results should then, in a further step, be processed statistically.