Sean Deason was kind enough to send me a CD of the Model 500 'Starlight' mixes, which I'd already bought in MP3 form from Boomkat. After the discussion yesterday about how MP3s are noticeable on a good sound system, this seemed like a golden opportunity to challenge the golden ears amongst you to a blindfold test of MP3 sonic quality.
http://www.cornwarning.com/m500-starlight-blindfold test.wav How this was made: 1. I ripped the uncompressed digital audio from the CD. 2. I cut a short representative sample out of the track. 3. I saved it to an uncompressed WAV file, with no processing whatsoever 4. I saved it as an 320KBS fixed-bit-rate MP3 file. I don't know which MP3 encoder Sony uses this days, but I'd guess they've licensed the current Frauenhofer CODEC. 5. I loaded both the WAV and the MP3 samples back into Sound Forge, and put them together in one file. Here's the challenge -- can you tell which sample comes first? There's a very tiny 'click' that will tell you where one sample ends and the other begins. Listen to it however you want, but if you load it in Ableton Live, set all level faders to 0dB and make sure that warping is turned off for this loop. According to the appendix of the Live Manual, with those settings, the sample passes through without change. If you listen in Winamp or ITunes, make sure that you turn off EQ and effects, and set the volume fader to 100%. If you don't think this is a fair track to try this on, feel free to send me a sample from another record that you think would more clearly show the difference in sonic quality between MP3 and Wav.
