AES Fall Online Convention

Handheld electronic devices like tablet computers are commonly used for the playback and streaming of music. With the growing popularity of multichannel and immersive audio technologies, it is important to know if they offer any improvement over traditional stereo and mono in terms of audio quality and user experience on such devices. This paper shows the results of four MUSHRA based listening tests that were conducted for the subjective assessment of multichannel audio versus stereo and mono while played back on a tablet computer with two different sets of headphones. BAQ (basic audio quality) and QoE (quality of experience) were the attributes measured. The results show that multichannel audio out performs stereo and mono for both the attributes and a repeated measures ANOVA (analysis of variance) also confirms that the audio format has a large bearing on the results. Though the use of different headphones does change the user ratings, the consolidated results for each test follow a similar trend.