Design of Sound Quality Index for Laser Printers and Its Application for Improvement Study

The sound quality based on design optimization, throughout the development process of various electronic office equipments, needs to be considered in order to respond the increased needs for the emotional satisfaction of customers in terms of psycho-acoustics. This paper focuses on how to describe the characteristics of operating sound radiated from laser printers by using various sound attributes, and to model the sound quality index that can properly evaluate the subjective preference on modification conditions in the improvement study quantitatively. Especially, the proposed verification process, in the form of combining the correlation based method and the decision error based method, was applied to improve the generality and reliability of a group of participants in the jury evaluation. The modified Aures tonality model was also proposed to improve the correlation coefficient with the mean response of participants by optimizing some parameters. As a result, the loudness, articulation index, roughness, tonality, fluctuation strength were used to model the sound quality index for laser printers by using the multiple-linear regression method. Through the improvement study, it was confirmed that replacing the absorbing materials is effective to reduce the tonalness radiated from the side of a reference printer model. Based on above results, it can be concluded that the proposed model has enough usefulness as quantitative evaluation index to evaluate the difference between modification conditions in the improvement study.