Classification of noise sources in a printer and its application to the development of sound quality evaluation

摘要

A printer noise is an annoying noise source in the office. Previous work for noise reduction in printers has shown that, because of the effects of many different types of noise sources, it is difficult to evaluate printer noise objectively by using only the A-weighted sound pressure level. In this paper, the characteristics of such sound were first investigated in a systematic approach, and a new objective evaluation method is proposed for printer noise. This method is called the total sound quality index, and was developed by the systematic combination of nine major sound indexes based on path analysis. These nine major sounds that radiate from a printer were selected through a basic investigation and evaluated by the members of a focus group, including a customer and a printer engineer. The nine major sound quality indexes were developed by using sound metrics, which are psychoacoustic parameters, and by the multiple regression method, which is used for the modeling of the correlation between objective and subjective evaluation. The newly developed total printer sound quality index can be applied to the objective evaluation of the six sample printers based on the customer preferences.