AES hosted an evening of what is hoped to be the first of many perceptual coding shootouts. Roughly 20 participants were in attendance and attempted to distinguish 32, 64, 128, 192, 256 kbps MP3 file against a lossless WAV file. For many participants, this was their first time trying to detect perceptual coding artifacts in a double blind A/B testing environment. The test was preceded by a short presentation that covered the basic principles governing perceptual coding. At the end of the presentation, participants were challenged to re-design the shootout to compare different coding schemes (MP3, WMA, OGG, AAC, etc...) of the same bitrate.
