A measuring instrument for the auditory perception of rooms: The Room Acoustical Quality Inventory (RAQI)

= 190 subjects rated their acoustical impression of 35 binaurally simulated rooms from 2 listening positions, with symphonic orchestra, solo trumpet, and dramatic speech as audio content. Subsequent explorative and confirmative factor analyses of the questionnaire data resulted in three possible solutions with four, six, and nine factors of room acoustical impression. The factor solutions, as well as the related RAQI items, were tested in terms of reliability, validity, and several types of measurement invariance, and were cross-validated by a follow-up experiment with a subsample of 46% of the original participants, which provided re-test reliabilities and stability coefficients for all RAQI constructs. The resulting psychometrically evaluated measurement instrument can be used for room quality assessment, acoustical planning, and the further development of room acoustical parameters in order to predict primary acoustical qualities of venues for music and speech.