Grouped pair-wise comparison for subjective sound quality evaluation

In subjective sound quality pair-wise comparison evaluation, time consumption grows with square of number of sound stimuli, which made the evaluation of large quantity of stimuli difficult to carry out. A grouped pair-wise comparison design (GPC) is proposed to greatly decrease time requirement and difficulties of subjective comparison test, where the whole evaluation stimuli are divided into n test groups, with reference link stimuli among each group. From subjective results of each group, final results of all stimuli are reconstructed, and their sound quality can be analyzed. With car interior sound stimuli as example, realization of the proposed GPC method is introduced. The results of GPC method are in good agreement with those obtained from pair-wise comparison and semantic differential method.