Increasing loudness in audio signals: a perceptually motivated approach to preserve audio quality

TL;DR

This paper introduces a perceptually motivated method to increase loudness in audio signals by reducing peak values without degrading perceived quality, outperforming classical compression and clipping techniques.

Contribution

A novel peak reduction technique that maintains audio perception by incorporating auditory masking constraints, enhancing loudness without quality loss.

Findings

Effective peak value reduction while preserving perceived loudness

Superior trade-off between loudness and audio quality compared to classical methods

Adjustable constraints allow tuning of audio quality and loudness levels

Abstract

We present a method to maintain the subjective perception of volume of audio signals and, at the same time, reduce their absolute peak value. We focus on achieving this without compromising the perceived audio quality. This is specially useful, for example, to maximize the perceived reproduction level of loudspeakers where simply amplifying the signal amplitude, and hence their peak value, is limited due to already constrained physical designs. In particular, we minimize the absolute peak value subject to a constraint based on auditory masking. This limits the perceptual difference between the original and the modified signals. Moreover, this constraint can be tuned and allows to control the resulting audio quality. We show results comparing loudness and audio quality as a function of peak reduction. These results suggest that our method presents the best trade-off between loudness and audio quality when compared against classical methods based on compression and clipping.