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Audio Format Listening Tests Concluded
Pointing to the conclusions of this listening study, nullity writes: "The results are interesting, and show a high variation in the performance of the various codecs on different musical styles. Ogg seems to work well on dance music, WMA8 on chamber music, etc."
Just as in many scientific experiment (and especially psychology experiments) it is very important to have (at least) one control.
A control is where the experiment is performed expect without the difference being tested for. The results of the control show (or not, as the case may be) that it is the thing being tested for that causes differences, not the experiment itself.
Here, there is no control - crappy experiment.
The participants could have just been scoring on "this is different to the unencoded track, therefore it must be worse".
So put a copy of the unencoded track as a test track and see if it gets marked down (and also, of course do NOT tell the participants that it is there).
Man did you guys even do the test or are you just looking at the results? I did the test with my klipsch speakers and I got nothing like what these crackheads got on this site. Makes me wonder what they were listening to. I was at my fiances house and used her speakers and the worse compression sounded the best. Then I cam home to my beautiful klipsch (best computer speakers I have heard) and the difference was amazing. In most of the tests not only could I see a huge difference but I could tell you which one was which. The only ones I had trouble with were the two oggs and on some files the mp3pro. The oggs tend to increase the highs a tiny bit making them very different than the other compressions that tend to remove highs. The mp3pro on some occasions wasas good or a little better than the oggs. But both oggs where in the top 3 every time I did the test. I call for a redo because I think either people were guessing, using bad speakers or had too much wax in their ears. I did my own test with the blind player with ogg and did the two styles of ogg versus mp3 at 96k and 128k. The 96k was horrible but at 128k you could hardly tell the difference from the 64k ogg files. The two oggs were almost identical in every test. The 128 was a little better in almost every test but at twice the size it was incredible. I also tried then to compress the ogg files as much as I could to 45k max bitrate. Man it still sounded good but on songs with lots of simbols you could see obvious compression. Bottom line if you use on a regular basis 128k mp3's switch to ogg at 64k without having them side by side you will _NEVER_ know the difference.
"We can no longer live as rats... we know too much." -Secret of NIMH
Listen to the percussion at the intro at 128kb, 160kb, 192kb, 320kb and CD audio. Do it through a proper system (hint: those hi-fi quality computer speakers you bought for £30 don't cut it) and compare the difference.
On the song in question, the intro is actually painfully distorted until 192kb when it becomes merely aging tape standard.
If you can't hear this difference having done exactly what I've said then I suggest you are not qualified to ever post a comment to a thread discussing audio quality again.
...For me to poop on!
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