The present disclosure relates to methods for evaluating the sound quality of a digital engineering process by, in part, measuring the frequency following response (FFR) of the human auditory system elicited by identical auditory stimuli (e.g., a musical interval) encoded with variations of a digital signal processing technique (e.g., various sampling rates). Once measured, the FFR may be analyzed to determine the comparative effect of each digital signal processing technique on a human subject's ability to process complex stimuli presented by the digital engineering process.