Assessment of Automatic Volume Leveling for Automotive Sound Systems

This paper presents an assessment of competing algorithms for normalizing volume levels between tracks and/or sources in an automotive infotainment system. Portable media players such as smartphones and iPod^® devices are extremely popular for listening to music collections or streaming content from the Internet. The lack of normalization is a source of dissatisfaction if the user experiences significant changes in audio level between tracks. Several commercially available algorithms exist to solve this problem. This research includes a double-blind listening test comparing an audio sample processed with the different leveling algorithms to an unprocessed reference. The listener preference rating is recorded and results indicate which algorithm is preferred.