13 Oct
2011
13 Oct
'11
12:08 a.m.
No, I'm afraid it was nothing of the kind and
extremely unscientific. I
certainly cannot discount the possibility that my brain bypassed my ears
and fooled itself. What is interesting, however, is that I actually did
*not* expect to see a difference between uncompressed audio and high
bitrate ogg/mp3, based on experiments I had conducted several years ago,
but did. I would really be interested in taking part in some kind of
double blind testing some time and see what the outcome is.
I'm fully aware of the effect, a skeptic at heart, and I find that I
still fool myself all the time into thinking I hear differences when I
don't. I wrote an ABX tool because *I* needed it to use for my own
testing.
You're on Linux, right? Just grab and build Squishyball:
svn co http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/squishyball
it's a lightweight, standalone double-blind tester. Hand it a few
comparison files, and off you go. It runs in a terminal. It can run
in a few modes, the manpage details them. It's useful for
non-rigorous testing too.
Monty