Patent ID: 8457954

Claim:
A sound quality control apparatus, comprising: a characteristic parameter extractor configured to analyze a characteristic of an input audio signal to extract a characteristic parameter; a speech score calculator configured to calculate a speech score indicating similarity to a speech signal characteristic, from the extracted characteristic parameter; a music score calculator configured to calculate a music score indicating similarity to a music signal characteristic, from the extracted characteristic parameter; a power value acquisition module configured to acquire a power of the input audio signal as a power value; a first storage configured to store speech scores and music scores in past predetermined sections; a second storage configured to store power values in the past predetermined sections; a power-based score corrector configured to correct a current music score or a current speech score based on a first comparison result between a current power value and past power values, a second comparison result between the current music score and past music scores and a third comparison result between the current speech score and past speech scores; and a sound quality controller configured to perform a sound quality control for the input audio signal by using at least one of the speech score and the music score corrected by the power-based score corrector.