The Effects of Loudspeaker Placement on Listener Preference Ratings

Through the use of an acoustically adjustable listening room and a binaural recording and reproduction system, live and binaural subjective evaluations were made of different loudspeakers placed in different room locations. The experimental results from both tests show that listener preference ratings for different loudspeakers are significantly influenced by the loudspeaker location within the room. In fact, the positional effects can be larger than the subjective differences between the loudspeakers themselves. The binaural evaluations indicate that listener preferences are influenced significantly by interactions between the loudspeaker, its location, and the type of program material auditioned. These secondary effects were less significant in the live tests, suggesting that traditional real-time listening tests may be inadequate for measuring or controlling these effects.