Qualitative evaluations of the acoustics of rooms: Real room studies and headphone studies

This pilot study attempts to qualify the use of headphones to evaluate the listening conditions of existing and proposed architectural spaces. Qualitative listening evaluations of speech and music were conducted in multiple locations in three different listening environments: a 2000-seat multipurpose concert hall, a 600-seat lecture room, and a 120-seat lecture room. Groups of college age students were asked to evaluate loudness, clarity, reverberance, spatial impression, and background noise using a questionnaire with a seven-point bipolar rating scale [Cervone (1990)]. The speech and music sources were played through two adjacent loudspeakers at the front of the respective rooms while the students completed the evaluation forms. The speech and music sources were binaurally recorded on a DAT at the listener locations in the respective rooms. At a later time, students were asked to evaluate the acoustical qualities of the binaural recordings made in the rooms using the same questionnaire. The recordings were presented to the listeners in a random order in a blind subjective evaluation. Data from real room evaluations and headphone studies are compared and conclusions are drawn regarding the potential for headphone listening experiments as a means to study qualitative aspects of room acoustics.