Neural Codec Speech Quality Metrics Evaluated: scoreq and utmos Lead

A recent study assessed 45 objective speech-quality metrics tailored for neural audio codecs, testing 17 codec conditions. The findings revealed that the metrics demonstrated strong correlations with subjective listening scores for clear speech, with scoreq and utmos attaining the highest Pearson correlations. However, it was noted that non-intrusive metrics tend to saturate at elevated subjective quality levels. This research evaluates the reliability of these metrics for neural codecs and has been submitted on September 30, 2025. The paper is available on arXiv under ID 2509.24457.