Many engineering organizations seek to learn what makes one product "high quality" in the eyes of the consumer relative to others available on the market. This is particularly true in the automotive market, where consumers have a plethora of overlapping choices.

A vehicle may easily meet functional requirements ("the locks latch properly") but convey a sense of poor quality because of an unpleasant sound ("but they seem pretty cheap to me"). While the importance of incorporating subjective factors in the engineering process has been recognized for a number of years, its implementation has proven very difficult.

Many engineers have taken quantitative recordings of system characteristics, and run subjective "jury" preference testing. The key lies in finding which aspects of the quantitative recordings differentiate those systems subjectively, and relating those aspects back to components or structures in the original system.

Quantum Signal has extensive experience in extracting salient features from recorded signals and finding their relation to customer preference. We have both knowledge of quantitative and qualitative testing methods, and, of course, the signal processing that will bring the two together.

Quantum Signal has worked with major vehicle and equipment OEMs and suppliers to better understand what makes their product tick in the eyes of the consumer, and have helped to greatly improve the perception! Many of our clients are surprised and impressed by the subtle differences we are able to extract using advanced characterization techniques.

We specialize in doing "A to B" comparisons of data, and will use the most powerful applicable technique(s) to find the differences. In most cases, Quantum Signal can do a preliminary study of your data at a surprisingly low cost!