The transmission of media (e.g., audio and/or video) over internet protocol (IP) links within an IP data network can result in significant media quality degradation due to the unpredictable nature of IP data networks. The quality of transmitted media can be degraded by many variables related to IP data networks such as the availability of bandwidth, encoding/decoding, network jitter, packet loss, network delay, etc. Degradation of media transmitted over an IP data network can be measured with a high degree of correlation with subjective quality ratings given by humans, but these known methods for doing so can be computationally expensive and/or cannot practically be used in real-time to monitor media quality. Known methods, for example, often require the decoding of encoded media data packets, which can be processor intensive, and often only provide a measure of the total quality of the media (or multi-media) experienced by end users. Measures of the total quality experience have somewhat limited use for network administrators who often want to know how much quality degradation is due to specific network impairments (e.g., just network jitter) over which the network administrator has a degree of control. Other known methods for measuring and/or calculating the quality of media transmitted over an IP data network have little correlation with subjective quality ratings. Thus, a need exists for a computationally efficient method for calculating the subjective quality of a media signal transmitted over an IP data network.