About the impact of audio quality on overall listening experience

When listening to music, rating the overall listening experience takes many different aspects into account, e. g. the provided audio quality, the listener's mood, the song that is played back etc. Music that is distributed over the Internet is usually encoded into a compressed audio format. Compressed audio formats are evaluated by expert listeners who rate these audio formats according to the perceived audio quality. Much effort is put into researching techniques for encoding music by having better audio quality at lower bit rates. Nevertheless, the beneficial effect that the audio quality has on the overall listening experience is not fully known. This paper presents the results of an experiment that was carried out to examine the influence that a song and audio quality have on the overall listening experience. The 27 participants rated their personal overall listening experience of music items which were played back in different levels of audio quality. Since listeners have different preferences when rating overall listening experience, the participants were divided into two groups of listeners according to their responses: song likers and audio quality likers. For both types of listeners, the effect of the audio quality on the rating of overall listening experience is shown.