[BC] Understanding TSL

[Goran Tomas]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Rich Wood <richwood at pobox.com> wrote:
> ------ At 09:07 PM 2/2/2010, Robert Orban wrote: -------
>
>>Jim Schulke did a lot of research regarding processing and audio
>>quality in general. But that was with a now-obsolete format
>>(Beautiful Music) and it was a *long* time ago.
>
> Actually, there's a lot of audience research being done.
> Unfortunately it's almost all proprietary. Jim's was also proprietary
> and only a few of us ever saw the results. The only part that leaked
> out was the most important. That was the effect of heavy processing
> and distortion on women.

On he AES conference in San Francisco in Sep. 2008 there was a session
on listener fatigue and longevity and one of the speakers, Ted
Ruscitt, shared with the audience the results of a research that one
of the big broadcasting networks (he didn't want to say which) order
from him. Ted couldn't have this published so you'll have to trust me
and my notes. They did a multitude of tests representing a number of
annoyances or distortion effects that typically appear in
broadcasting. Among the listening panel were a number of young people
as well. The list, from less annoying to most annoying, goes something
like this:

* audio (multiband) compression - people didn't object much, some
actually preferred it
* bad mono compatibility
* too much L-R
* bad audio-to-video sync - obviously, this one concerns TV
* clipped audio - listeners wanted to turn the volume down, females
were more sensitive
* stacked coding
* low bitrates and lossy formats - listeners could tell lossy audio
every time; 48 kbps didn't sound "HD" to them; some of the comments
were "something is wrong with that one", "it
sounds plain, while the other one sounds alive", etc; younger people
were more sensitive

Regards,
Goran Tomas