Industry Expert Blogs

In Part 1 of this topic of Evaluating Spatial Audio, we talked about what constitutes a ‘spatial audio’ product system, the key challenges involved, objective and subjective means of evaluation, and some of the key spatialization parameters to pay attention to. Make sure you check out that blog post, as this piece builds on the concepts covered in that one.

As a quick refresher, ‘Spatial Audio’ is a broad umbrella term that is used to describe an array of audio playback technologies, where the primary focus is to enable the listener to listen and experience sound as we do in the real world – in three dimensions.

It is also important to mention that spatial audio is an inherently subjective psychoacoustic phenomenon that differs greatly from person to person, based on their physiology. Everyone has their own set of ears and physiology, unique to them, and accordingly, our hearing systems and unique subjective listening experiences are finely tuned by our own specific anatomy. You can read more about spatial audio here.

Thus, without even getting too far into the weeds when it comes to file formats, channel orders and configurations, content specific requirements etc., we can see that the inherent subjectivity of the perceived experience makes evaluating spatial audio difficult.

There seems to be a lack of an industry standard framework to evaluate the spatial audio experience. Here at Ceva, we set out to develop such a framework, to evaluate spatial audio in a systematic and repeatable way, providing a guide for anyone to be able to gauge the efficacy of a spatial audio solution.

We started by limiting ourselves to the form factor of Android phones and True Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbuds, amassing a few different options to compare. Having established the parameters we wanted to test, we then conducted a competitive analysis between the various options. In this blog post, we will focus on the content used, and the philosophy that went into curating some of it.

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