Measuring Sound Experience with In-Vehicle Speaker Systems

Measuring the perceived quality of speaker systems in the car together with potential users is important to evaluate new speaker developments. Existing sound perception questionnaires suffer from being difficult to answer for human beings because audio perceptions are, for the average user, hard to express in words. In this paper, we present a questionnaire that focuses on user experiences that drivers and passengers have with in-car speaker systems. It uses seven items each representing a dimension of car sound user experience. We describe the development of the questionnaire and a first study, which compares the experiences of two speaker systems. Our questionnaire showed a high reliability and enabled us to compare the level to which the speaker systems evoked positive experiences.

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