Saturday 21 June 2014

24-bit vs. 16-bit Blind Listening Test Closed...

The day has arrived...



The survey for the blind test ended today! Thank you for everyone with the patience in taking the time to listen to the 3 samples and submitting your results. A few people admitted to only listening "a few times" but it certainly looks like the majority took the time to seriously listen and I certainly appreciate the detailed responses provided.

In total, I received 140 responses over the 2 months. Here's the map of the countries with submissions:



As you can see, not unexpectedly we have 3 main "clusters" of input from audiophiles - N. America, Europe, and the Pacific region (Asia + Australia + New Zealand). Then there's the single South African submission :-). The breakdown looks like this:

North America: 36 USA + 12 Canada = 48

Europe: 14 UK + 1 Spain + 6 France +2 Belgium + 8 Netherlands + 12 Germany + 1 Denmark + 4 Sweden + 4 Norway +1 Finland + 1 Estonia + 2 Austria + 3 Italy + 7 Croatia + 4 Hungary + 1 Bulgaria + 1 Turkey + 1 Cyprus +1 Israel = 74

Asia & Oceania: 1 India + 1 China + 1 Taiwan + 2 Malaysia + 3 Australia + 1 New Zealand = 9

Africa: 1 South Africa

Unknown: (for some reason IP could not be traced to country, I've seen this with Russian IP addresses) 8

I didn't work out the per-capita numbers but 7 from Croatia caught my eyes! Nice.

As in the MP3 Blind Test, I'm going to be posting the results over the next week or two in parts. Coming up in the next 24 hours will be a description of the procedure. This will include the "answers" as to which samples were the 24-bit audio. I'll speak about how the files were created as well as the dithering algorithm used. Following this will be the results and then a discussion of the implications of the findings...

Stay tuned!

Part I: PROCEDURE

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