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By Jason Parker 5/24/05



The sequestered jury during a testing break (from left to right): Eliot Van Buskirk, Karen Whitehouse, Kurt Wolff, Peter Gavin, Justin LaBo, Brian Satterfield, Aaron Newton, and Anngie Dehoyos

Any test worth its salt needs an objective proctor, and this was no exception. To make sure the jury had no clue which codecs they were listening to, we asked Senior Editor Wayne Cunningham to randomly play sound clips, hand out No. 2 pencils, and keep the whole test running smoothly. He also periodically played the WAV file for reference anytime a juror requested.
To select our eight jurors, we searched the company for folks with audio expertise and high standards when it comes to sound quality. From Download.com's software department, we asked Justin LaBo, Brian Satterfield, and Karen Whitehouse to participate in the listening test. We then called in Anngie Dehoyos, Aaron Newton, and Kurt Wolff from the Download.com Music team. Finally, Peter Gavin and Eliot Van Buskirk from MP3.com rounded out our crew of demanding jurors.

Senior editor and spyware expert Wayne Cunningham gets his hands dirty behind the mixing board.

The test was administered in CNET's acoustically treated radio station at our San Francisco headquarters. The jurors listened to the tracks on a pair of JBL 4408A studio monitors, which were powered by a Hafler Transnova power amplifier. The WAV, AAC, and MP3 files were ripped using the latest version of iTunes, whereas the WMA files were encoded with Windows Media Player 10.0. The OGG clips were ripped with the lesser-known Quintessential Player. Just for fun, we tossed a 96Kbps MP3Pro file (the highest bit rate that codec supports) into the mix, but since that file scored lowest in every instance, we omitted it from our official results.



Intro         |         See the winners         |         Full test results         |         How we tested
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