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Given the substantial time and complexity involved in the perceptual evaluation of head-related transfer function (HRTF) processing, there is considerable value in adopting numerical assessment. Although many numerical methods have been introduced in recent years, monaural spectral distance metrics such as log-spectral distortion (LSD) remain widely used despite their significant limitations. In this study, listening tests were conducted to investigate the correlation between LSD and the auditory perception of HRTFs. By distorting the magnitude spectra of HRTFs across 32 spatial directions at six levels of LSD, the perceived spatial and timbral attributes of these distorted HRTFs were measured. The results revealed the limitations of LSD in adequately assessing HRTFs' perception performance. Based on the experimental results, a perceptually enhanced spectral distance metric for predicting HRTF quality has been developed, which processes HRTF data through spectral analysis, threshold discrimination, feature combination, binaural weighting, and perceptual outcome estimation. Compared to the currently available methods for assessing spectral differences of HRTFs, the proposed method exhibited superior performance in prediction error and correlation with actual perceptual results. The method holds potential for assessing the effectiveness of HRTF-related research, such as modeling and individualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Application: In Auditory Augmented Reality (AAR), the real room is enriched by virtual audio objects. Position-dynamic binaural synthesis is used to auralize the audio objects for moving listeners and to create a plausible experience of the mixed reality scenario. For a spatial audio reproduction in the context of augmented reality, a position-dynamic binaural synthesis system can be used to synthesize the ear signals for a moving listener. The goal is the fusion of the auditory perception of the virtual audio objects with the real listening environment. Such a system has several components, each of which help to enable a plausible auditory simulation. For each possible position of the listener in the room, a set of binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) congruent with the expected auditory environment is required to avoid room divergence effects. Adequate and efficient approaches are methods to synthesize new BRIRs using very few measurements of the listening room. The required spatial resolution of the BRIR positions can be estimated by spatial auditory perception thresholds. Retrieving and processing the tracking data of the listener's head-pose and position as well as convolving BRIRs with an audio signal needs to be done in real-time. This contribution presents work done by the authors including several technical components of such a system in detail. It shows how the single components are affected by psychoacoustics. Furthermore, the paper also discusses the perceptive effect by means of listening tests demonstrating the appropriateness of the approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]