Speaker
Description
Hearing aid requirements extend beyond restoring audibility to ensure user comfort, a critical determinant of overall satisfaction. Comfort is largely managed by controlling maximum power output, typically via fast-acting compression in output limiters. However, a significant trade-off exists between comfort and sound quality, particularly for signals like music; literature consistently reports negative user experiences during loud music exposure due to these processing constraints. Objective sound quality models offer a promising way to reduce listener exposure to loud situations and expand testing conditions during development.This presentation reviews existing metrics and evaluates their performance in a specific use case: predicting the impact of output limiters on the sound quality of loud music. The relationship between predicted sound quality and perceptual ratings was examined across different limiter implementations. Group analysis indicates that concordance between perceptual and predictive methods is not systematic. While agreement is high when perceptual differences are large, objective metrics can yield qualitatively different conclusions when perceptual differences are negligible. Furthermore, we discuss how reference condition definition, rater selection, and sample size influence the analysis. These results highlight the need for caution when interpreting sound quality predictions outside of their original application domains.