High bitrate MP3 vs. Lossless ABX Tests?, Are there any studies...? Options

[Street Samurai]

Hi All,

I've been corrected before on this site for making the statement: "I can tell the difference between an MP3 and lossless". I've never ABX'ed myself but I was wondering if there has been a statistically significant (with regard to population) ABX study done with (say) Lame insane vs. Lossless?

Clearly for myself it makes more sense to do a personal ABX but I was wondering in general about the population.

I searched manually through the posts in this forum (since search seems useless for the term 'mp3') and didn't see anything.

Thanks for help,

ss.

This post has been edited by Street Samurai: Jun 2 2005, 01:02

[ff123]

A few things to note about Roberto's tests:

1. People who pull the hidden reference slider down on any codec are typically excluded from the analysis (although I think if there are only a few listeners, he may decide to rely on ABX results, if there are any, to make a final decision about whether or not to exclude a listener's results). This is a much tougher standard than just excluding somebody who has a negative impairment score. However, it does mean that the results will always be less than 5.0 for any codec. Remember that Roberto isn't trying to find out whether or not a codec is statistically distinguishable from the reference, only what the relative ratings are of the codecs under test.

2. Although there may be a few "problem" samples mixed in with Roberto's tests, the prevailing idea has been to be representative of "real" music. I don't know if the MPEG tests are tilted towards problem samples or not.

3. The group of people who participate in Internet tests are probably skewed towards more discriminating listeners.

All this is saying, which should be rather obvious, is that Roberto's tests don't necessarily compare with the MPEG tests, although I think they certainly serve their purpose. But that purpose does not include determining if a codec is statistically the same as the reference.

ff123