Sound Quality For Improving Your Product 

Consumers identify sound as a major component in the overall sound quality of any product – from cars to hand tools and heavy machinery. Although some product noise is inevitable, it can often be transformed into a suitable sound, such as the weighty thud of a high-quality car door, or even a desirable sound, such as the throb of a high-performance motorcycle.

A higher sound quality raises overall perceptions of product quality, which leads are raised – leading to increased sales and greater brand equity.

Objective and Subjective Sound Quality

Designing specifically for sound quality is challenging since ‘desirable’ sound quality is determined by how we perceive sound, using our ears and brains. Sound measurements such as frequency response describe the nature of the sound itself, but don’t measure the physical processes that take place in our ears, nor the cognitive processes in our brains.

However, all of these factors contribute to our subjective sound experience. To give designers clear targets that account for the whole picture and allow effective sound engineering, you need to quantify sound quality.

Sound Quality Metrics

Humans perceive some sounds more easily than others, so we can add weight to these using sound quality metrics such as Zwicker Loudness. In the end, however, only the human ear can tell the designer whether or not the product has the right sound. This means subjective testing of customer expectations is important when determining acceptable sound quality.

Jury testing allows listeners to rank sounds and score them for qualitative sound quality metrics like roughness. Analysis software translates these into objective values, thus giving engineers the sound target inputs they need to aim for, such as a certain amplitude vs. frequency profile. During development, you can apply this methodology to design changes, and to evaluate them as you optimize the sound quality for your product..