To get a less biased judgment, I set up blind audio-quality tests.
Many people say they can hear the difference between music compressed at different levels, but their experiences could be shaped by their expectations: They know they're listening to a highly compressed song, so they blame the compression for every real or imagined flaw. wma files, compressed to 160 kilobits per second (kbps), the whole album is less than 64MB, leaving room for 127 similarly squeezed albums. You couldn't fit 15 albums of equal length on an 8GB MP3 player. wav files, they would take up 556MB of space. For instance, if you ripped the songs from Dire Straits' album Brothers in Arms to your hard drive as uncompressed. m4a-all use lossy compression that throws away musical nuances to reduce download times and fit more songs on players. The most common consumer audio formats-.mp3. Most important, none of the compressed music samples sounded terrible to their well-trained ears. mp3-the level of compression had little effect on how they rated the sound quality. Although the type of compression had a definite effect-the judges preferred. I tested the effect of compression with a jury of music professionals, and the results surprised me. But does it hurt the quality enough to affect our listening pleasure? We all listen to compressed music on our computers and portable players, and we all know that compression is supposed to hurt sound quality.
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