Audio System Evaluation with Music Signals

Synthetic test signals, such as multi-tone signals or sweeps, are mostly used for the development and end-of-line testing of components and the complete audio systems in cars. Those signals provide objective, reproducible and interpretable test results in a short time. In contrast, the customer uses the audio system to reproduce music and speech, which are non-stationary signals with complex spectral and temporal properties. This paper discusses measurement methods that can be used for assessing the performance of the audio system by using any synthetic and natural (music) stimuli. A new technique based on adaptive modeling of the linear time variant distortion is used to combine physical and perceptual evaluation of the residual nonlinear distortion.