We have a local group of audiophiles and wannabe audiophiles that get together every so often to compare notes, new music, audio equipment and so on. Last Friday we conducted an encoding format test.
I am a frustrated scientist/statistician, impassioned long term audiophile and Media Jukeb.. uh I mean Media Center devotee. These tests were conducted using Krell Electronics, an awesome pair of Eggleston Andra IIs, a Meridian 8000 CD player, Cardas cables and JRiver Media Center 9.088 (oh, yeah and a reasonable amount of sushi and Saki).
Four songs were picked, they were:
Instrumental: She by James Newton Howard (great audio test cut).
Voice: Bird on a Wire by Jennifer Warnes
Symphony: New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak (a 30 second sample that included very light thin passages followed by full on thunder passage..
Recovered from Vinyl: Fire by Arthur Brown; Using Acid Foundry for clean up.
Each was encoded:
MP3 at 128kbs
WMA at 192kbs
APE lossless.
There were 9 listeners, filling out secret ballots. Each music sample was 30 seconds long. Each song sample was played twice thru in each encoding format, then the next sample rotated thru twice. Not too much Saki had yet been ingested.
Summary of Results:
4 Listeners could detect no difference in the formats.
1 Listener liked the MP3 best
2 Listeners liked WMA best
2 Listeners liked APE best.
Observations:
The two that liked APE best were classical music fans.
T
he one that liked MP3 best is a rock and roll fan and, you should be warned, has been known to say things about wine like "it has a certain humor" . .
Of the five that had a preference they said there was very, very little difference.
Attempts to describe their preferences included words like "richness" "depth" and "character" (or were they talking about the Saki?).
For whatever its worth,
Ken