Voulenteers:- 128kb codec comparison test

I have been a somewhat regular at the Hydrogen Audio forums for exactly a year (in 5 days time!) - and a friend of mine is conducting a listening test to judge the quality of different encoders at 128kbs.

The line-up pitches MP3 (LAME) against Ogg Vorbis, Quicktime AAC (which won the battle of the AAC's test), WMA and MPC.

I haven't seen audio compression mentioned much around here, but I would imagine there are a number of people with good equipment and more importantly good hearing, which I sadly lack

If anyone is interested, a direct link to the simple instructions is here, along with the software download.

The more people that take the test, the more statistical significance that can be gained from the results, so if you have a couple of hours free time to spare please try out a couple of samples

Thanks

so if you have a couple of hours free time to spare

 I think if I were you I would have left that phrase out!  But thanks for drawing our attention to what may be of interest to some.

Hmm.. yeah that could put people off :S

2 hours would probably get you the whole test done, I managed to spend that time hitting my head off 2 samples where I couldn't even tell the marker file (real low quality file to help keep your ratings in perspective) from the original..

Unfortunately, I'm pretty busy these days. But it seems interesting. Oz was right though about the fact that that once sentence may have been a little too much, hehe

Just so that you know, the test has finished and the results are in



The four modern formats perform very similarly under these conditions, which I guess is a testament to the outstanding quality in them all.  MP3 (as LAME) lags behind significantly, but still puts up a worthy fight, just think if we all used blade..