AQuA 7.x Release

AQuA – Audio Quality Analyzer

Hi,

We are pleased to announce availability of AQuA version 7!

AQuA is capable to work with audio files represented in WAV format. Audio files should have the following parameters depending on the version one uses:

AQuA	Sample rate	Bits per sample	Compressions	Channels
Voice	8kHz	8, 16, 24, 32	Uncompressed, a-law, u-law	Mono
WB	8kHz – 192kHz	8, 16, 24, 32	Uncompressed, a-law, u-law	Not limited (16 channels max)

Main advantages of AQuA perceptual model are:

Language independent
Capable of predicting MOS score for short sequence of speech (less than 4 seconds)
Capable of predicting MOS score for long sequence of speech (longer than 30 seconds)
Capable of evaluating different types of audio: various bit depth, sampling frequency, Mono, Stereo

This version has extended report on reasons for voice quality degradation providing additional metrics, which you can find in bold in sample report below:

Duration distortion.

Audio stretching corresponds to 1.41 percent.

Delay of audio signal activity.

Signal delayed by 100 ms.

Corrupted signal spectrum.

Overall spectral energy distortion approaches 61.58 %

Vibration along the whole spectrum [-14.31, 47.27] %

Significant distortion in low frequencies band.

Energy distortion approaches 31.47 %

Spectrum vibration in low frequency band [-12.52, 18.95] %

Significant distortion in medium frequencies band.

Energy distortion approaches 27.22 %

Amplification approaches 25.42 %

Value Name Source Degraded Units

SNR : 63.16 69.59 dB

Average pitch : 145.12 155.59 Hz

Pitch delta : 2.44 2.99 Hz

ASR : 44.27 42.22 %

RMS classic : 0.0010 0.0015

RMS bounded : 0.0040 0.0068

Is RMSbounded valid: true true

AvgEnergy : 31.08 26.82 dB

MinEnergy : 6.94 1.02 dB

MaxEnergy : 70.10 70.60 dB

AvgSample : 83 10

MinSample : -11460 -10216

MaxSample : 11253 10981

Ampltude Clipping : 0.04 0.23 %

Pitch frequencies distribution distortion : 19.85.

Samples values distribution distortion : 16.82.

Quantization steps distribution distortion : 56.66.

Most of AQuA customers represent the following business segments:

VoIP service providers
Mobile service providers
PSTN service providers
Sattelite service providers
Audio and web conferencing providers
Radio communications
Unified communications
Solution providers for telecom

AQuA helps telecom business to solve a wide range of tasks:

test conference bridges quality when dialing from different locations
monitor quality on a conference bridge
monitor quality to certain destinations
monitor quality at different terminations by end-to-end testing with termination’s echo server
test quality in converged networks (f.e. Mobile-VoIP)
IVR system tests
device testing in various environments
audio improvement algorithms development

Among AQuA benefits one will definitely appreciate:

AQuA is available for Windows, Linux and MAC OS operating systems
AQuA is available for both for 32 and 64 bit systems
AQuA is easy to deploy and use for software products development
AQuA provides perceptual estimation of audio quality and can be utilized in VoIP, PSTN, ISDN, GSM, CDMA, LTE/4G, satellite and radio networks and combinations of those
AQuA is available as Android native library for custom software development