As the human ear is dull to the phase in speech, little attention has been paid to phase information in speech coding. In fact, the speech perceptual quality may be degenerated if the phase distortion is very large. The perceptual effect of the STFT (Short time Fourier transform) phase spectrum is studied by auditory subjective hearing tests. Three main conclusions are (1) If the phase information is neglected completely, the subjective quality of the reconstructed speech may be very poor; (2) Whether the neglected phase is in low frequency band or high frequency band, the difference from the original speech can be perceived by ear; (3) It is very difficult for the human ear to perceive the difference of speech quality between original speech and reconstructed speech while the phase quantization step size is shorter than π/7.
