STM Article Repository

Audio systems are widely used in our dairy life, and many indexes can be enrolled into sound quality evaluation, where dynamic range (DR) is a very important metric for audio systems. However, lacking a formal definition for the DR causes ambiguities in performance evaluation. Existing DR measuring methods may not always correspond to actual application settings, and certain specific distortion behavior of the device under test (DUT) is not extracted. The audio distortion dynamic range (ADDR) is presented and confirmed in this research as a new metric for evaluating the DR performance of audio systems. It unites the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SINAD) indexes under the same measurement circumstance and eliminates the ambiguity of measurement conditions through a clear description. Furthermore, the definitions of traditional indexes based on classification of distorted components are replaced by variable thresholds in the ADDR definition to fully reflect the impact of harmonics, spurious, and noise components on the DUT. Following that, the technical steps of ADDR are analyzed, as well as the essential aspects that influence its accuracy, and then the optimal measurement settings are supplied. Experiments with simulated DUTs reveal that the ADDR index can detect performance differences that traditional indexes cannot, demonstrating that it is a valuable complement to existing indexes in some real applications.