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Search results for Pepsi challenge

Last week, I posted a challenge to listen to two pairs of audio samples, and answer two simple questions about them. If you haven’t tried it yet, you might like to check it out before you read the answers.

Six months ago, I did a similar experiment to see if people could tell the difference between compressed an uncompressed audio. Although the results didn’t suggest that anybody could tell difference, it had one key flaw: it’s impossible to prove that nobody can do something. Without testing all the people all the time, you might miss somebody, and that somebody might be working for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

This time, I approached the problem from the opposite direction: is it possible for people to think they’re hearing differences that don’t exist, and are these false perceptions vulnerable to suggestion? (more…)

Here’s a simple scientific experiment. Please listen to this audio file* and answer the question below. The file (all 56mb of it) contains three versions of the same 1’15” excerpt of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K.491. One is the original uncompressed CD-quality audio, the other two are compressed, like you’d download from iTunes or Amazon. Can you tell which is which?

 

EDIT: Did you get it right? Did anybody else? The results are now in.

* The sample is from this album, which I heartily recommend. I picked it because it contains all the things that typically encode badly: piano and strings, loud and soft. It’s a big file. It has to be, because the whole thing’s gotta be at CD quality for the science to work. I’m sorry if it takes a while to download. This is what music would be like on the Internet without compression, because CD quality audio is quite a bit bigger than the stuff you’re used to downloading. There are formats that make CD-quality audio a bit smaller, but they don’t work on many of the popular players.

Is there a glaring hole in my methodology? Use the comments. I’ll close the poll and post the answers (and results) when we’ve got enough votes.