The complexity of sound quality engineering—only a technical issue?

Abstract

It is an absolutely essential task to enhance the perceived quality of technical products in order to stand out against competitors in times of a highly competitive market. It is clear that sound quality engineering has changed over time from basic level reduction needs to more complex sound quality design processes taking into account several psychoacoustic quantities. Today, it is very evident that sound level indicators are completely insufficient in describing and predicting perceived sound quality. Nevertheless, it is still an ambitious and challenging task to design product sound adequately, which indicates functionality, high quality, and corporate identity at the same time. To fulfil this task sound quality engineering work must change from a simple technical consideration to an interdisciplinary perspective, where knowledge from engineers, psychologies and sociologists is required. Sound quality is not an inherent product property, it develops when listeners are exposed to and interact with a technical product finally judging on the basis of their experience, expectation and context. Sound quality engineering has to consider these “confounding” variables. The paper will highlight the newest developments in the field of sound quality engineering of technical products. For it, experimental data collected with different test methods and its respective analysis results will be shown and discussed.