THE EFFECTS OF LOUDSPEAKER PLACEMENT ON LISTENER PREFERENCE RATINGS

Through the use of an acoustically adjustable listening room and a bin aural recording and reproduction system, live and binaural subjective evaluations were made of different loudspeakers placed in different ro om locations. The experimental results from both tests show that liste ner preference ratings for different loudspeakers are significantly in fluenced by the loudspeaker location within the room. In fact, the pos itional effects can be larger than the subjective differences between the loudspeakers themselves. The binaural evaluations indicate that li stener preferences are influenced significantly by interactions betwee n the loudspeaker, its location, and the type of program material audi tioned. These secondary effects were less significant in the live test s, suggesting that traditional real-time listening tests may be inadeq uate for measuring or controlling these effects.