EVALUATING THE PERFORMANCE OF OBJECTIVE AUDIO QUALITY METRICS IN RESPONSE TO COMMON AUDIO DEGRADATIONS

He, Xie; Williams, Duncan; Fazenda, Bruno

Abstract

This study evaluates the performance of five objective audio quality metrics-PEAQ Basic, PEAQ Advanced, PEMO-Q, ViSQOL, and HAAQI-in the context of digital music production. Unlike previous comparisons, we focus on their suitability for production environments, an area currently underexplored in existing research. Twelve audio examples were tested using two evaluation types: an effectiveness test under progressively increasing degradations (hum, hiss, clipping, glitches) and a robustness test under fixed-level, randomly fluctuating degradations. In the effectiveness test, HAAQI, PEMO-Q, and PEAQ Basic effectively tracked degradation changes, while PEAQ Advanced failed consistently and ViSQOL showed low sensitivity to hum and glitches. In the robustness test, ViSQOL and HAAQI demonstrated the highest consistency, with average standard deviations of 0.004 and 0.007, respectively, followed by PEMO-Q (0.021), PEAQ Basic (0.057), and PEAQ Advanced (0.065). However, ViSQOL also showed low variability across audio examples, suggesting limited genre sensitivity. These findings highlight the strengths and limitations of each metric for music production, specifically quality measurement with compressed audio. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available upon publication.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: DAFX
• Start Date: Sep 2, 2025
• Acceptance Date: May 6, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jun 26, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx25)
• Publisher URL: https://dafx25.dii.univpm.it/