He's wrong, it's the third one.


At least htat's my vote. :-P

Wow, that's a good demo of the sampling Chris.

To me, only track 2 seemed not quite as full as the others, which (1, 3, and 4) were pretty well, no, not pretty well, but in fact entirely indistinguishable to me.

I actually tried to make these worst case, so it'd be easiest to tell them apart. I'll make another challenge that's designed to be difficult this evening.

Oh, and PM me if you do want the answer.

I like that. We've got no consensus on which one is which, and you tell us this is the EASY one. Heh.

Designed to be easy, from the track selection (those high pitched sounds should have been a give-away for poor compression), to the poor depth reduction. I really wanted to be able to hear the difference myself, but alas I couldn't.

That was neat but listening to those made my ears ring.

But which made your ear feel golden before the ringing?

I pick 4 then 3 as the best. Man we are all over he map

OK, the easy test is over. Time for the difficult one. This one is just about bit-depth, not lossy compression.

These files are longer, I wanted a full reference of dynamic ranges, since that's supposed to be what 24-bit gains over 16.

http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/track-b1.wav
http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/track-b2.wav
http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/track-b3.wav
http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/track-b4.wav
http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/track-b5.wav

Two of the files above are full 24-bit. The other three are dithered down to 16-bit with noise shaping. The 8 least significant bits are 0-filled so the files are all the same size. You challenge is to tell me which two files are 24-bit.

Before you had a 25% chance of guessing right, now it's only 10%. But if 24-bit really is that large of an improvement it shouldn't be difficult.