Speech intelligibility tolerates group delay changes up to about 100 ms

Evidence

Group delay changes have to be about 3–5 ms with speech and music before they can be perceived. If the changes are of the order of 5–10 ms, they begin to be detectable if the effect of the listening room is minimal. With some phase-insensitive signals, such as noise or diffuse sound, changes in group delay may not be perceived even with longer delays. • Although the changes in group delay may be perceived as changes in the timbre of sound, the effect on communication, or on speech intelligibility, can be small. For example, even 100- ms group delay changes can be introduced into speech signals before intelligibility starts to vanish. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1280

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Group delay perception thresholds depend strongly on signal content and context (similarity 0.91)
• Plosive pauses of 60-150 ms go unnoticed in speech perception (similarity 0.86)
• Group delay audibility threshold is 1.6 to 2 milliseconds (similarity 0.86)
• Group delay detection threshold is 1.6-2 ms (similarity 0.84)
• Group delay affects perceived quality only when it varies with frequency (similarity 0.82)
• Group delay of modulation is the phase representation most relevant to hearing (similarity 0.82)
• Headphone group delay alters audibility of phase-spectrum effects (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Group delay audibility threshold is 1.6 to 2 milliseconds #qualifies (0.85) — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 973