The Adjustment / Satisfaction Test (A/ST) for the subjective evaluation of dialogue enhancement

Media consumption is heading towards high degrees of content personalization. It is thus crucial to assess the perceptual performance of personalized media delivery. This work proposes the Adjustment/Satisfaction Test (A/ST), a perceptual test where subjects interact with a user-adjustable system and their adjustment preferences and the resulting satisfaction levels are studied. We employ the A/ST to evaluate an object-based audio system that enables the personalization of the balance between dialogue and background, i.e., a Dialogue Enhancement system. Both the case in which the original audio objects are readily available and the case in which they are estimated by blind source separation are compared. Personalization is extensively used, resulting in clearly increased satisfaction, even in the case with blind source separation.