cygweb

Via HydrogenAudio: I've always admired Roberto Amorim's listening tests that compare the quality of various audio codecs. I've neglected to submit results in many of his previous tests, but I'm going to try to participate in his current 32kbps test.

Over the years I've tried streaming MP3 and Vorbis at low bitrates, sometimes reducing the samplerate of the source to make it more more compressible. I've always been sensitive to that; currently I stream ICYG at 44.1KHz stereo Vorbis Quality 0, which is quite efficient (averaging 64kbps or less) and sounds OK to me for what it is. I want to participate in the listening test to see how development is going in the low-bitrate world, and to see how Vorbis compares to the other players. I probably won't change my streaming specs as a result, though. We'll see.

I encourage any of you reading this to participate, as more opinions will increase the validity of the test.

Update: Darn. With all the holiday activity I must have missed the original announcement. The testing period is scheduled to end today. I may not have time to take it.

Update 2: I took the entire test (kind of quickly, but I took it) and submitted my results. Boy, 32kbps can make a lot of stuff sound like crap. ;)