Acoustic Characterisation by Using Different Room Acoustics Software Tools: A Comparative Study

A room impulse response (RIR) describes the acoustic behaviour of a certain source-receiver combination within a room. In order to characterise an enclosure, several emission and reception positions are used. Current computers, equipped with suitable hardware and software, enable these RIRs to be registered, processed and analysed in an efficient way. This paper presents a study of the differences in the results obtained from the use of four commercial software tools widely used in room acoustics. Comparisons are drawn up from the RIRs measured with each tool under the same conditions. To this end, the main room acoustic parameters defined in the ISO 3382-1 are calculated. For each parameter, the differences between both the spatially averaged value in octave bands and the spectral average at each receiver point are studied, since these values are normally used to characterise the acoustics of a room. Furthemore, a more detailed study is carried out to evaluate these differences point-by-point in statistical terms, by analysing the dependence on several factors, such as the position of the source, the relative positions of the receiver points, and the frequency band. In order to assess the importance of the differences found, the Just Noticeable Difference (JND) is taken as a reference.