Variation of HDD Sound Quality Metrics over a Sound Power Microphone Array

摘要

A growing trend among manufacturers of information technology (IT) equipment is to place acousticspecifications on the system as a whole rather than on the individual components, and to base thosespecifications on sound quality rather than sound power. Due to the throughput limitations of systemstesting and the high cost of test equipment such as binaural heads, it is desired to perform developmentaltesting at the component level using existing sound power measurement systems, with final qualificationtests performed at the system level. In order to do so, some correlation between the component and systemlevel data needs to be established. The first step in such a correlation is to quantify the sound quality of thecomponent, a hard disk drive (HDD) in this case. This work presents measurements of loudness, sharpness,roughness, and prominence ratio of several HDDs, as determined at the ten microphones of a hemisphericalarray in a hemi-anechoic room.