Patent ID: 7844452

Claim:
A sound quality control apparatus comprising: a characteristic parameter calculator configured to calculate various kinds of characteristic parameters to determine a speech signal and a music signal from an input audio signal; a speech characteristic score calculator configured to provide scores to, among various kinds of characteristic parameters calculated by the characteristic parameter calculator, characteristic parameters indicating a speech signal and to calculate a sum of provided scores as a speech characteristic score; a music characteristic score calculator configured to provide scores to, among various kinds of characteristic parameters calculated by the characteristic parameter calculator, characteristic parameters indicating a music signal and to calculate a sum of provided scores as a music characteristic score; and a controller configured to determine closeness to a speech signal or a music signal of the input audio signal based on a score difference between the speech characteristic score calculated by the speech characteristic score calculator and the music characteristic score calculated by the music characteristic score calculator and to perform sound quality control processing for speech or music, the controller comprises a speech enhancement processor constructed so as to make controls to emphasize center localized components in accordance with the score difference with respect to the input audio signal when the input audio signal is determined closer to a speech signal based on the score difference between the speech characteristic score and the music characteristic score.