AES Europe 2026

The authors proposed a stereo-width shrinkage method for
headphone reproduction, in
which crosstalk from loudspeaker reproduction is added to
the original stereo
sources. In this study, we investigate the sound quality of
stereo-width-shrunken
sources with different parameter settings. A Semantic
Differential method is
employed to quantify the subjective characteristics with
five adjective pairs,;
the naturalness of the stereo width shrunk sources is
evaluated in detail with
Scheffé’s paired comparison. The results of the Semantic
Differential method
comprehensively rank the sound sources. Interestingly, the
results of the paired
comparison are not reversed in the natural; unnatural
evaluations, whereas the
negative evaluation yields reasonable results. These
results provide valuable
insights for practical sound-quality evaluation.