Required audio fidelity scales with the application’s communicative demands

Evidence

The applications are very different, and the required technical specifications for acceptable functioning may also be very different. Starting from the most basic cases, in certain environmental monitoring systems where the goal is simply to be aware of some sound events, very large deviations in the magnitude and the phase spectrum of the reproduced sound may be allowed. When the requirements are more demanding, the acoustic attributes of the original sound event have to be transmitted with higher fidelity to the listener. For example, with minimum requirements in speech communication, speech is barely understandable without the delivery of prosodic or personal features. In general, the better the original sound signals are preserved in sound reproduction, the higher the quality of reproduction obtained. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1792

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to information-theoretic ideas of necessary vs. redundant signal features in a communication channel.