About Online Testing

Traditionally sound quality and psychological listening tests are performed under controlled conditions (e.g The Lab) comprising of a well controlled listening room, with high quality loudspeakers, etc. Depending on the nature of the tests, either test subjects, consumers or so-called expert assessors perform the tests. Either way, the assessors have to be found from a representative demographic and then brought into The Lab in order to perform the listening tests. Whilst this is a very common process for many listening test types, e.g. audio codec tests comparing things like MP3 against AAC, this is pretty time consuming and costly. As a result such procedures cannot be widely used. 

One of the concepts within DELTA SenseLab within the eXsL project has been to take the listening tests out of The Lab and into The Home. The basic idea here has been that, as audio is already in a digital format, it can be easily brought into the users home via a computer and a web browser. 

As a results DELTA SenseLab as developed SenseLabOnline.com as a professional listening tests service that allows for listening tests to be performed anywhere (The Lab or The Home), by anyone (Consumers, Expert, etc.) at anytime (365/24/7). 

Of course the big question is whether comparable results can be gained in home testing (via a web browser and PC) compared to the highly controlled Lab environments. To study this question DELTA SenseLab took one of its most critical listening tests (based upon ITU-R BS.1116-1) with a very critical audio coding study and compared results from The Lab against The Home. 

The conclusions were quite amazing. In this very critical listening tests, statistically identical results were obtained in both conditions. To learn more about this study, check out our publication on the matter: 

S V Legarth, J Ramsgaard, G Le Ray, N Zacharov, “A performance comparison of Home Usage Testing and Central Location Testing in small impairment listening tests”, in Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Perceptual Quality of Systems (PQS), Dresden, Germany, 6-8 September, 2010

Of course we need to get a step further in actually applying home test in a more psychological perspective. But we still believe that it is possible to balance the tradeoff between complete control, amount of data, and convenience for test subjects and experimenters alike.