EDIT :
RESULTS ARE IN
Bit Rate Challenge No. 1
This thread is a spinoff thread from this one :
http://www.musicbanter.com/general-m...mparisons.html
Some .. No wait - lemme start again. Many people claim that they are able to identify lower bitrate files from higher bitrate files. Some people suspect it, but perhaps they haven't tried. I'm giving everyone a chance to try this out now.
I've made a little html page with a flash player on it that plays mp3s. I guess most have flash, so I'm assuming there's no compatibility issue. What I want you to do is to listen to the mp3s on my flash player. It has a playlist on it with 4 files in different bitrates. All files are of course recordings of the same piece of music and they are named track 1 to 4. I want you to arrange track 1 to 4 as a sequence of 4 numbers starting with the lowest bitrate file and ending with the highest.
>> Test Yourself Here! << Edit : GONE!
The test is anonymous - noone except me will know your results unless you choose to share them!
PS! DO NOT POST YOUR RESULTS HERE AND DO NOT DISCUSS WHICH OF THE FILES YOU THINK IS WHICH! Instead, send your results to me by PM!
Please also say something about what equipment you used (pc speakers, earphones, hi end hi-fi system) and rate your own hearing ability (bad, medium, good).
I want each person who does this to be independent of others results and any discussion here. You can of course discuss non-results related stuff here.
This is round 1 and I may try other genres and so on later. Lemme know what you think.
Oh - and should you find a way to cheat, don't do it!
Details and methods :
The highest possible quality FLAC (lossless) was ripped from original Audio CD. The FLAC file was then opened in Audacity 1.2.6 and cut down to a ~30 seconds segment. This segment was then exported to MP3s of different bitrates using Lame MP3 Writer Plugin for Winamp v1.6.4 (lame_enc.dll).