Hearing-impaired professionals give confident but unreliable sound quality judgments.

Evidence

In terms of “overall sound quality,” there is some disagreement between the groups. Those with normal hearing preferred all of the channels running at or close to reference levels; anything else is a degradation. Note that the difference between all three channels running at reference level, and the L and R loudspeakers attenuated by 3 dB, is trivial (and statistically insignificant). In total contrast, listeners with hearing disabilities, having difficulty understanding speech, clearly voted for progressively more monophonic sound. They obviously associated speech intelligibility with sound quality. — , Toole, Floyd E - Sound reproduction-…, 1437 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Hearing loss makes listener opinions unreliable no matter how experienced; Hearing-impaired listeners equate speech intelligibility with overall sound quality. — , Toole, Floyd E - Sound reproduction-…, 1437; Even modest hearing loss increases variability in sound quality judgments (+5 more)

Related

• Hearing loss makes listener opinions unreliable no matter how experienced (similarity 0.94)
• Hearing-impaired listeners equate speech intelligibility with overall sound quality. (similarity 0.92)
• Hearing-impaired listeners give inconsistent sound-quality ratings unlike normal-hearing subjects (similarity 0.90)
• Roughly 75 percent of people have sufficiently normal hearing to make reliable loudspeaker judgments (similarity 0.88)
• Mild hearing loss makes trained listeners give inconsistent sound quality judgments (similarity 0.87)
• Audio mixers’ occupational hearing loss can impair their sound-quality judgments (similarity 0.86)
• Even modest hearing loss increases variability in sound quality judgments (similarity 0.86)
• Hearing-normal listeners give far more consistent loudspeaker quality ratings. (similarity 0.84)
• Musicians make poor or unreliable subjective loudspeaker evaluators (similarity 0.83)
• Natural-sounding speech can still be poorly intelligible (similarity 0.82)
• The ‘we can’t measure what we hear’ myth stems from inadequate measurements (similarity 0.81)
• Hearing-impaired listeners need higher signal-to-noise ratios than normal hearers do (similarity 0.81)
• Trained and untrained listeners mostly rank loudspeakers the same way (similarity 0.81)
• Declared normal hearing can still hide degraded sound-quality opinions. (similarity 0.81)
• Musicians judge loudspeakers on different rationales and can be inconsistent raters. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Hearing loss makes listener opinions unreliable no matter how experienced #corroborates (0.95)
• Even modest hearing loss increases variability in sound quality judgments #corroborates (0.85)
• Hearing-impaired listeners equate speech intelligibility with overall sound quality. #qualifies (0.80) — , Toole, Floyd E - Sound reproduction-…, 1437
• Audio mixers’ occupational hearing loss can impair their sound-quality judgments #qualifies (0.80) — , Toole, Floyd E - Sound reproduction-…, 1246
• Measurable and audible sound qualities can be shown to correlate reliably #complicates (0.70)