This test is useless. It was subjective.
Of course the test is subjective (if you mean by that that the criterion was listening, not measurement). Do you want to say that by looking into plots of two compression-mangled tunes (waveform, spectrum, whatever) you can say which sounds better? The whole purpose of lossy compression is to produce a file that
sounds indistinguishable from the original in as little space as possible. If the test was realy double-blind as they claim, that is as objectively as you get.
The MP3 encoder was not Fraunhofer's.
OK, perhaps they sould have tested inventor's codec, as they did with others.
Actual file size advantages between codecs was not compared. (the only reason to bother with lower bitrates)
Er, perhaps I am wrong, but what else is there in the files except the audio stream? Doesn't 128kb/s mean exactly that, 128 kilobits of data per second of playtime?
Other formats (not MP3) are not playable in most appliances other than a PC.
At least one more is (if only for a handfull of 2.0 alpha testers
). They did not test how
practical various codecs are, but how difficult it is to distinguish their result from the original.
Just to name a few. The whole thing is a joke.
As I said, the test was rather naive and did not address any of more subtle aspects of obtaining a good compression, but still has some value (at least for mass audience).
Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green
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