How to determine audio quality?

[melgish]

Reading through various messages I see many topics about audio settings, quality file size etc.

I don't trust my ears...So what other ways are there to determine the quality of audio?

Specifically are there any tools that can be used to measure the deltas between an original audio track and a compressed one?

Help!

[Bishep]

I know such tool :D It's EAQUAL. You can download it from RareWarez: http://www.inf.ufpr.br/~rja00/others.html

It' not so easy to compare audiotracks using this tool, so visit http://home.wanadoo.nl/~w.speek/eaqual.htm (I found some help there)

This program actually helped me to compare MP3, AAC, OGG, WMA & choose OGG :) But, please, note, that it can be somethimes less "objective", than our ears, because "how music sounds" often much more important than "how it compressed". Sorry for my english :p

[tangent]

The only real way to compare quality is to actually listen to it, perform ABX testing, etc.

EAQUAL developement has halted long time ago, and left off with one known bug in the implementation of the ITU-R BS.1387 model. Also, testing of EAQUAL shows that its results do not correlate very well with listening tests.

For more information you can do a search for EAQUAL on http://www.hydrogenaudio.org Lots of audio quality discussion there too.

[melgish]

Thanks I will check it out!