Dial-Up Audio Public Listening Test Opened

CaptainCheese writes "Hydrogenaudio.org's Roberto Amorim just announced the opening of their 32kps multi-format listening test, intended to test the current 'dial-up' quality codecs. From the Announcement: "The formats featured are Nero Digital Audio (HE-AAC+PS), Ogg Vorbis, WMA9 Std., MP3pro, Real Audio and QDesign Music Codec. Lame MP3 is being used as low anchor, and a lowpass at 7kHz is being used as high anchor." These codec tests are unusual in that they adhere to ITU-R BS.1116-1. The test is open until July 11th and all are invited to participate. There's more info in the original test discussion, which indicates the originator is interested in 'testing formats working on dial-up streaming bitrates' - the test page notes: 'The real arena where codecs are competing, and most development is going, is at low bitrates.'"

Comments

Get the news out to portable music player

[ralphart]

Now if only the companies who manufacture digital players would take a look and see that there is life beyond MP3. Nice that a few are starting to offer Ogg Vobis, but they are few and far between.

Re:Get the news out to portable music player

[2nd Post!]

Eww, skip the wma, please, for my sake.

The less the world is tied to Microsoft standards, the better off we'll all be, I think.

Re:Get the news out to portable music player

[Haydn Fenton]

Although many people are opposed to any microsoft anything, I have to say that their WMA format is very very useful at low bitrates.

I can use [a trial] of WMA Workshop to compress music files to as low as 2kbs. That's nothing special within itself, however, what is impressive (no matter how its done, IMO), is the fact that you can hear (and pretty clearly too) both the music AND words to the vast majority of songs. Which makes it perfect for sending my friends ultra-small previews (normally around 200kb in size) of full songs, so they know what they sound like - no doubt we've all told somebody to downl.. *cough* buy a song, but they hesitate because they think it will sound crap.

Note to members of the RIAA: The above statement is purely fictional. I have never and would never even consider the illegal distribution of music.

Is this a double-blind test?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it isn't, you'll only find out the most popular format, not the best.

Re:Is this a double-blind test?

[sploo22]

AS a matter of fact, it certainly is. Follow the link at the bottom of the page (to here) and you'll see this information:

One of the most acclaimed methods of comparing codec quality is by performing so-called "Double Blind Listening Tests". In this sort of test, the participant compares various encoded samples against each other and against an uncompressed reference sample. The blind part means that the participant doesn't know which sample was encoded by which encoder. That guarantees there'll be no psychological bias towards his/her favorite codec, or against the codec he/she dislikes.

Re:Is this a double-blind test?

[Matchstick]

It only needs to be a blind test, unless you worry that the computer administering the test is biased.

Re:Results may be flawed

[FlipmodePlaya]

Good point. Can a study that will probably have relatively small survey size of an opinionated tech crown likely to exhibit bias be trusted? I don't know too much, admittedly, but wouldn't an automated test that just compared the output of a compressed audio track to the original be more accurate? Or is there more truth than I think to certain frequencies being worthless and inaudible by human ears?

Re:What's the point?

[Sam3.14]

I agree that there isn't that much point to testing such low bitrates. People are quickly switching to DSL and Cable, And I think that there won't be many Dial-up users in 2010.

Slashdot Low Bitrate Ethnocentrism

[neildiamond]

Wow! I thought people on this site would have been a little more understanding. Believe it or not there are other places in the world (such as Africa) where high-speed Internet is not the norm or even available. Plus if you stream audio, any attempt to lower bandwidth is a plus as it lowers your bills.

Get over yourselves please.

By the way, did you ever notice the lack of multimedia even on this site? Why might that be? Hmmm...

Re:What's the point?

[Nakito]

Testing at low bitrates emphasizes certain weaknesses of a codec. At high bitrates, it takes a more sensitive and trained ear to detect the artifacts and flaws. But as you reduce the bitrate, the differences become apparent. If you've never tried experimenting with it you might find it interesting, because the various codecs produce very different sounds with the same source file when the bitrate is drastically reduced. But I wonder if this is a proper way to evaluate the best design overall, since some of these codecs are certainly not optimized for low bitrates, and I do not know if there is necessarily a correlation between the flaws of a codec at low bitrates and those at higher bitrates.

Re:Why bother?

[evilviper]

no matter how good the codecs are, 32kb/s music just doesn't cut it.

Damn, this is the kind of crap that gets modded-up these days...

Codecs continue to get better and better. Vorbis is pretty good even at 48K (artifacts are subtle). And even if this was 1997, and 32K sounded like crap with current codecs, you're statement is just like the famed "640K is enough for anybody", and "there is a world market for maybe a dozen computers". It's absolutely guaranteed to be proven wrong with time.

Re:Results may be flawed

[Grant29]

Yeah, and probably some people have some crappy speakers. Some people would probably even try it with thier on-board speaker...

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Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might find it useful for:

- streaming video + sound
- voice chat while playing a game that is already sucking up a good portion of your bandwidth
- running a voice-chat server (ex: TeamSpeak), because (a) you're streaming out to multiple people, and (b) your upstream bandwidth is usually the limiting factor since most cable and dsl have shitty upstreams.

There are probably a lot of other uses but those two just stuck out in my mind.