Subjective Evaluation of Several Efficient Speech Coders

The voice quality of several 9.6 - 32 kbit/s coders is determined with an extensive set of subjective listening tests. Single encodings of μ255 PCM, adaptive differential PCM (ADPCM), subband coding (SBC), vocoder-driven adaptive transform coding (ATC), adaptive predictive coding (APC), and time domain harmonic scaling combined with SBC are compared in an idealized situation, that is, no added impairments. It is shown that single encodings of modest complexity 32 kbit/s coders such as ADPCM and SBC and more complex 24 kbit/s coders such as vocoder-driven ATC and APC offer quality nearly equivalent to 64 kbit/s μ255 PCM. However, these conclusions are drawn in the absence of a realistic telephone network where tandem encodings, delay limitations, and nonvoice signals exist. Tandem encodings of 64 kbit/s μ255 PCM, 32 kbit/s ADPCM, 16 kbit/s SBC, and 16 kbit/s APC are also evaluated. These 32 kbit/s and 16 kbit/s coders offer degraded tandem performance as compared to 64 kbit/s PCM, with the exception of synchronous tandeming of 32 kbit/s ADPCM with 64 kbit/s PCM where several encodings are subjectively equivalent to a single encoding of 32 kbit/s ADPCM.