Regional differences in listener preferences for head-tracked binaural audio

The relative contribution of spatial and timbral qualities to preference formation in immersive audio remains debated, with prior studies reporting different weighting patterns across listener populations. This study investigates the perceptual weighting strategy underlying listener preference for head-tracked binaural audio. Fifty-three experienced listeners from East Asia (South Korea and Japan) and North America (Canada and USA) conducted Scheffé’s paired-comparison task using five binaural renderers in their default user-facing configurations, producing perceptual scale scores. These scores were analyzed using a linear mixed-effects model (LMM). Within this experienced-listener sample, the East Asian group placed greater weight on Spatial Quality ( β = 0.754) than on Timbral Quality ( β = 0.328), whereas the North American group showed a more balanced weighting pattern (Spatial β = 0.616, Timbral β = 0.507), without a clear dominance of one dimension over the other. These findings suggest region-dependent evaluative tendencies among experienced listeners and support further investigation of listener-dependent personalization in binaural rendering.