Jeff Atwood's "Great MP3 Bitrate Experiment", From the Coding Horror blog. Options

[kinnerful]

http://lifehacker.com/5920793/the-great-mp...rate-experiment
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/t...experiment.html

I guess lifehacker has a larger audience than hydrogenaudio... could be interesting

[db1989]

It’s more likely that JJZolx is asking about the titular experiment, not questioning your scepticism about exceptional samples being extrapolated as representative of entire libraries. In which case, reading the page is predictably instructive, but for convenience:

Behold The Great MP3 Bitrate Experiment!

As proposed on our very own Audio and Video Production Stack Exchange, we're going to do a blind test of the same 2 minute excerpt of a particular rock audio track at a few different bitrates, ranging from 128kbps CBR MP3 all the way up to raw uncompressed CD audio. Each sample was encoded (if necessary), then exported to WAV so they all have the same file size. Can you tell the difference between any of these audio samples using just your ears?

1. Listen to each two minute audio sample
[links]

2. Rate each sample for encoding quality
Once you've given each audio sample a listen – with only your ears please, not analysis software – fill out this brief form and rate each audio sample from 1 to 5 on encoding quality, where one represents worst and five represents flawless.

So, no: ABX was not used, but the test was blind nonetheless.