Perceptibility Of Aggressive Dynamics Processing In Digital Audio Broadcasting

Radio broadcasters have been pushing the loudness of FM processing for years in effort to attract more listeners, despite all accompanying negative effects on audio quality. It is likely to expect that such practice will continue with digital broadcasting as well. Our goal was to determine how listeners perceive varying degrees of aggressiveness of dynamics processing for digital broadcasting, and in particular how aggressive dynamics processing influences quality of perceptually coded audio. A listening test was conducted with eight samples of varied aggressiveness of dynamics processing, before and after encoding with HE-AAC v1 at 48 kbps stereo.