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RE: I don't have the anechoic chamber needed for such research!

Posted by David Aiken (A) on January 23, 2008 at 05:22:51

In Reply to: RE: I don't have the anechoic chamber needed for such research! posted by KlausR. on January 23, 2008 at 04:46:53:

Though I'm not a professional researcher, I've had to do research in a non-audio health related area for a post-grad qualification and I did manage to do it well enough to present it at a professional conference and have it published in a peer-reviewed journal.

You're right, performing meaningful tests—whether they be listening tests or other tests—isn't easy but that doesn't mean that you need complicated setups for all tests. You don't need an anechoic chamber to study the effects of the treatment of reflections in a listening room. In fact using an anechoic chamber would defeat the purpose of your tests if you're concerned with the effects of treating normal home listening rooms. What you need is:

- a hypothesis that states how listeners are expected to perceive the change in sound quality resulting from the acoustic treatment of a room. This is the first of the 2 really critical factors in the study;

- a reasonably representative average home listening room;

- a sound system, either stereo or surround but it would certainly be preferable to do different tests for each;

- a set speaker and listening position setup that doesn't vary through the tests;

- some way of treating reflections; professional treatments with known acoustic properties from independent tests would be best, plus a standard set of treatment placements for individual evaluation;

- subjects;

- and finally a good protocol for getting subject responses, one that doesn't have hidden biases in the questions that would tend to colour the responses This is the second of the 2 critical factors.

The first and last points are the hard ones because they're the ones that will really make or break the validity of your findings. The physical aspect of the test set-up is simple and remains fixed throughout the tests. It's also described in the report of the study so that others can duplicate the setup in order to replicate the study.

Your hypothesis and protocol for gathering subject responses really are the critical factors, not the physical set-up. Get the hypothesis wrong and you end up testing for the wrong things. Ask the wrong questions or ask the questions in the wrong way and you run the risk of influencing the subject's responses in ways that reduce the reliability of your data and/or make it unclear just what interpretation should be placed on the data. These are the parts that everyone doing research that relies on test subject responses has to really sweat on. The rest of it, the phsyical set-up in the sort of case we're talking about, can be a cake-walk in comparison.

And that leaves only the final bit: analysis and interpretation of the data. Provided the hypothesis is quite clear and the data protocol is appropriate, the interpretation of the data should be relatively straightforward.

As I said, you could do it in your own listening room PROVIDED your test design has a clear and testable hypothesis and a good protocol for gathering data on subject responses. You could do it in your room with your system and your listening set-up and do it well enough to have it published in the peer-reviewed research journals provided you get the protocol and data gathering right. You don't need a fancy lab set-up to test the responses of subjects to treatment of reflections in the average real world listening room.



David Aiken

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