AES Europe 2026

Innovative railway vehicle systems such as high-speed rail,
maglev,; emerging transportation concepts are expected
to reduce conventional noise sources related to wheel–rail
; aerodynamic interactions. As these changes alter the
acoustic characteristics inside railway cabins, reliable
laboratory reproduction of interior noise becomes
increasingly important for evaluating passenger acoustic
comfort; guiding sound design during vehicle
development. Innovative railway vehicle systems such as
high-speed rail, maglev,; emerging transportation
concepts are expected to reduce conventional noise sources
related to wheel–rail; aerodynamic interactions. As
these changes alter the acoustic characteristics inside
railway cabins, reliable laboratory reproduction of
interior noise becomes increasingly important for
evaluating passenger acoustic comfort; guiding sound
design during vehicle development. The study focuses on
practical methods for assessing reproduction accuracy.
Conventional validation of reproduced sound fields
typically relies on sound pressure level; spectral
matching; however, these metrics alone may not fully
reflect perceptually relevant differences between in-situ
; reproduced environments. In this work, sound quality
indices are employed as complementary evaluation metrics to
examine whether reproduced sound fields maintain
perceptually meaningful characteristics of the original
cabin noise. Comparisons between in-situ recordings;
reproduced sound fields were conducted in terms of overall
sound pressure level, frequency characteristics,;
selected sound quality indices. In addition, the influence
of loudspeaker number; spatial configuration on
reproduction performance was examined. The results show
that sound quality–based evaluation provides useful
additional information for assessing perceptual fidelity
; for optimizing spatial sound reproduction systems for
railway cabin noise. The proposed reproduction platform
supports laboratory-based assessment of interior railway
noise; provides a practical framework for perceptually
informed acoustic evaluation; noise control during the
design of next-generation railway vehicles.