Questionnaire Results

This questionnaire was created to achieve objective four of this project. Sixty-nine participants took part from the ages of 18-60 and from a variety of backgrounds such as audio and games development students, restaurant staff, music retailers, accountants and film industry professionals. The participants were accessed through Abertay University and online questionnaire tool Surveymonkey (2013), which allows surveys to be posted on social networking websites such as Facebook (2013).

The results show some interesting figures:

Figure - Question 1

Figure - Question 2

Figure - Question 6

The Figure for question one shows that only a third of the participants own a 5.1 surround sound system. This is interesting to see seen as this system has been around in the mass market for almost two decades and yet such a high percentage of the participants do not yet own one.

The following two questions were for the two thirds of the participants that do not own a 5.1 surround system. The aim of these questions was to find out if they would consider purchasing one and if not the reasons for this. The Figure for question two shows that just under 60% would consider buying a 5.1 system. The other 41.3% said that they would not consider purchase the system, this is a relatively high number and upon further investigation into the participants comments on question three and results for question six the reasons for this are clear. 

Participants comments on question three stated that they thought 5.1 systems were "too expensive" and even that "stereo is good enough for listening to music". The figure for question six again confirms that a high percentage of the participants still prefer stereo for music reproduction. 40.58% said that even given the choice they would still prefer to listen to their music in stereo format. 

Figure - Question 4

Figure - Question 5(A)

Figure - Question 5(B)

Questions four and five look further into the third of the participants that own a 5.1 system and what type of media they use their system for. It is shown is the figure for question four that the majority of the subjects that own a 5.1 system use it for films, games and television, however, almost 20% do use it for listening to music. These results confirm that the majority of surround sound owners do use their system for media with a visual basis. 

Question five's aim was to find out wether the participants knew if they had music in a surround sound format. This question has been split in to two different figures, one for only subjects that own a 5.1 system 5(A) and the other for all subjects 5(B). 

Question 5(A) shows that a high percentage of the subjects that own a 5.1 system either do not own or do not know if they own any music in a 5.1 format. 34.78% said that they don't own any music in 5.1 surround and the same percentage said that they do not know, this is almost 70% of the subjects that own a 5.1 system. It is very interesting that such a high percentage of system owners do not know if they own music in a surround format and is leading towards the notion that this is a gap in the consumer's knowledge about the difference between stereo and surround file formats. 

Looking at the figure for question 5(B) for all participants, it further confirms that there is a gap in the consumer's knowledge about music file formats. 56.52% of all the subjects said that they did not know if they owned music in a surround sound format. This gap in the consumer's knowledge could possibly be one of the reasons for the lack of the 5.1 systems use for purely music reproduction. 

Figure - Question 7

Questions seven and eight's aim was to find out how the subjects currently purchase/access and playback their music. The majority of the comments on question eight stated that they use headphones, computer speakers and car speakers for playing back their music. Headphones are not an ideal listening environment for stereo listening as they direct sound straight into the ear canal, this diminishes the cues for direction and localisation in human hearing (see glossary of terms human hearing section). 

Questions seven's figure shows that the majority of the subjects download or stream their music files. This means that they are most likely to be small compressed audio files such as MP3, which is a "lossy" format, this means that when the file is converted to an MP3 some of the music's detail is lost unlike Wave files used on CD's. Surround sound music files are likely to be very large compared to stereo MP3 files, this makes the probability of fast downloading or streaming less likely.