A study on the preferred level of late reverberation in speech and music

This paper studies how the aesthetic preference of late reverberation depends on the mixing level of the reverberation. Towards this goal, three subjective listening tests are presented. In the first test, the participants adjust the mixing ratio between the input signal and the reverberated signal according to their personal preference. The mean mixing ratios for each item and reverberation time from these results are used in two further listening tests studying the way the subjective rating of the resulting signal is affected by deviating from the optimal mixing level. The results suggest that the subjective rating decreases more when deviating from the optimal mixing ratio towards higher reverberation levels.