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Sound transmission loss and sound absorption measurements are conducted to characterize acoustical performance of noise control materials and components used in vehicles. These measured data are often used to select materials and define acoustical targets. It is imperative to have accurate and repeatable data. Process variability is often monitored using measurement data collected over time. A certain amount of variability due to random causes is always expected. Acoustical measurements have inherent variability from different operators, equipment, test setup, environment etc. When variation in the measurements is due to random causes the measurements are in-control and measured data are considered “good”. However, special cause variations in the measured data such as operator error or setup error must be identified and corrected. Control chart is a popular statistical tool for monitoring process variability and improving quality.

Values of the speech intelligibility index (SII) were found to be different for the same speech intelligibility performance measured in an acoustic perception jury test with 35 human subjects and different background noise spectra. Using a novel method for in-vehicle speech intelligibility evaluation, the human subjects were tested using the hearing-in-noise-test (HINT) in a simulated driving environment. A variety of driving and listening conditions were used to obtain 50% speech intelligibility score at the sentence Speech Reception Threshold (sSRT). In previous studies, the band importance function for ‘average speech’ was used for SII calculations since the band importance function for the HINT is unavailable in the SII ANSI S3.5-1997 standard.