Evaluation of binaural rendering quality for professional audio

Electroacoustic simulation tools can be enhanced by realistic binaural audio rendering of the modelled audio system. Even if binaural technology is known since decades, it is still struggling to have a strong impact as working tool for acoustic consultants or audio system engineers, mainly because it is difficult to assess the perceptual equivalence between a real sound scene and its binaural rendering by headphones. In the last years, research efforts have been devoted to investigating binaural authenticity. In this brief we address binaural authenticity for a practical use case, in the context of binaural rendering of modelled electroacoustic systems. We ran a perceptual test in which audio system engineers compared stereo loudspeaker playback of a given audio content with binaural rendering via headphones of the same playback, to verify whether the electroacoustic modelling and binaural synthesis processes could have introduced critical artefacts to the original loudspeaker-based sound scene perception.