Arena Sports in Stereo Versus Binaural - Rating and Important Attributes

Abstract: Although a majority of the listening is done on headphones today, most, if not all, televised arena sports is still mixed for loudspeakers. By providing binaural audio for headphones listening, the qualities of surround sound could potentially be experienced on headphones. To find out if this holds true, 13 subjects with experience of critical listening agreed to perform a listening test where they were asked to rate four attributes of which preference is one. To the rating of preference, they also had to argue for their thinking. Lastly, further attributes and qualities was collected to find what attributes seem to be of greatest importance for rating of arena sports in binaural. The results show no statistical significance when comparing the ratings of the binaural and stereo mix for each attribute, and the sample group is clearly disagreeing what stimuli to rate the highest. The collection of qualitative data gave better results and could be summarized to seven attributes of which four appeared in the data from more than half of the test subject. With this result it is clear that more research is needed to find what the most important aspects of binaural mixing are, and how binaural audio best can be used for televised arena sports.