1. Amandine Pras et al., "Subjective Evaluation of MP3 Compression for Different Musical Genres" (Audio Engineering Society 127th Convention, 2009) [^1]
- Design – 13 trained listeners (9 recording engineers, 4 professional musicians) took double-blind A/B preference tests. Each excerpt (pop, metal-rock, contemporary classical, orchestra, opera) was presented in the uncompressed 44.1 kHz/16-bit version and five MP3 bit-rates: 96, 128, 192, 256 and 320 kb/s (LAME encoder).
- Key 320 kb/s result – For 256 kb/s and 320 kb/s the panel showed no statistically significant preference for the WAV over the MP3. Only the most experienced engineers (≥7 years studio work) could sometimes identify the 320 kb/s file, and even they performed just above chance.
- Take-away – In controlled ITU-style tests even trained ears could not reliably distinguish 320 kb/s MP3 from uncompressed audio across all five ge