HUANG Yu1 CHEN Ke'an1 YAN Liang1 WU Qunli2

(1Department of Environmental Engineering, College of Marine, Northwestern Polytechnical University  Xi'an 710072)

(2 BSWA Technology Co., Ltd.  Beijing 100080)

Received Jun. 4, 2008

Revised Jul. 15, 2008

Abstract In the subjective sound quality evaluation based on paired comparison method, time cost grows with square of the number of samples, which makes the evaluation of large quantity of sample difficult. An adaptive grouped paired comparison (AGPD) design was proposed to greatly decrease time requirement and difficulties of subjective comparison test, and to avoid the reduction of the precision when improper reference samples were chosen in common grouped paired comparison by adapting the seeds. The mathematic theory and implementation method were given, including the experimental formulae. It was shown from computer simulations and the subjective sound quality evaluation that the results of the proposed AGPC method were in good agreement with the true merits of samples and those obtained from conventional paired comparison.

PACS numbers: 43.50, 43.66