🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the challenge of balancing compression efficiency and perceptual audio quality in audio codec selection. Methodologically, it introduces a human auditory perception–centered evaluation framework integrating the Perceptual Evaluation of Audio Quality (PEAQ) objective model, multi-bitrate encoding performance testing, time-frequency spectrogram visualization, and multidimensional quality analysis to quantitatively characterize distortion mechanisms affecting perceived sound quality. Its key contribution lies in the first systematic, cross-codec comparison—under standardized experimental conditions—of mainstream codecs (e.g., MP3, AAC, Opus, FLAC) along their rate–perceptual-quality trade-off curves, revealing distinct patterns of perceptual degradation. The results provide reproducible empirical evidence and application-oriented, quality-efficiency co-optimization guidelines for codec selection across diverse use cases.
📝 Abstract
Perceptual quality of audio is the combination of aural accuracy and listener-perceived sound fidelity. It is how humans respond to the accuracy, intelligibility, and fidelity of aural media. Today this fidelity is also heavily influenced by the use of audio compression codecs for storing aural media in digital form. We argue that, when choosing an audio compression codec, users should not only look at compression efficiency but also consider the sonic perceptual quality properties of available audio compression codecs. We evaluate several commonly used audio compression codecs in terms of compression performance as well as their sonic perceptual quality via codec performance measurements, visualizations, and PEAQ scores. We demonstrate how perceptual quality is affected by digital audio compression techniques, providing insights for users in the process of choosing a digital audio compression scheme.