Sound quality means judged preferability, not category membership

Evidence

The concept quality has two meanings. ‘Quality’ is used in this book as a synonym for ’excellence’, to grade or rank objects on a subjective scale of preferability such as ‘good–poor’, based on some explicit or implicit criteria. The other common meaning is related to categorization by type or class of objects. When two observations or entities cannot be compared on the same (metric) scale they are said to be qualitatively different. Such category-related sound quality pertains to perceived features, attributes, factors, dimensions, or properties of auditory events, such as loudness or roughness. However, in this book, the term ‘sound quality’ is limited to the meaning involving preferability or acceptability. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2311

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the two senses of ‘quality’ and which one the book uses.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2311
• XREF: connects to: Sound quality is judged as deviations from ideal amounts of perceptual dimensions; Audio content is defined by meaning to a listener, not technical properties; Sound quality is fundamentally subjective and requires perceptual testing to characterize (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Sound quality is fundamentally subjective and requires perceptual testing to characterize #corroborates (0.90)
• Objective sound quality models have limited domains of validity and cannot replace subjective testing #corroborates (0.85) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2337
• Distortion rarely drives subjective ratings of consumer loudspeakers #exemplifies (0.80)
• Consumer Reports loudspeaker ratings inversely predicted perceived sound quality. #exemplifies (0.75) — , Toole, Floyd E - Sound reproduction-…, 583
• Measurable and audible sound qualities can be shown to correlate reliably #qualifies (0.75)
• Musicians who are not audio enthusiasts judge loudspeakers on different rationales #exemplifies (0.75)