Experiment on Your Friends (or Simple Psychology Experiments that Destroy People's Whole World View)

Here's a little experiment you can try on your friends.

Take a true lossless file and use iTunes or whatever you like to create an inferior version (160kps or whatever you like). If you are unsure of the source of your file, take a CD and rip a 320kps and a 160kps version.

This next part is critical -- make sure they are normalized to the same volume.

I'd also suggest that you use regular computer speakers or iPod style headphones and turn off any and all eq, and effects in your software, but that's really up to you... whatever you do, be consistent for each song (volume, eq, listener position).

Make a playlist that plays :30 seconds (arbitrary number, but why listen to the whole damn song?) of one file twice, and the same :30 of the second file once. Make sure that your subjects can't tell which is which by reading the file names or whatever, perhaps rename the three files with random letters (Q, F and J or something like that).

Have your subject listen to all three files and ask them to tell you which one is different. It's also a better design if you have yet a third person run the experiment who doesn't know which file is which and if you are out of the room or at least out of the subject's view. Repeat the experiment, ideally with at least 10 friends. If you don't have 10 friends or don't like letting people in your home, round up some tech friendly hobos on the street.

Random chance says 33% will get the right answer just by luck -- those people will take this not as sign of random probability but of their innate genetic superiority -- don't ruin it for them. If four or more of your friends can tell the difference -- congrats they did better than random chance. I'd still guess that more than 50% will get it wrong.

You could then ask them to tell you what files were the higher quality and lower quality files -- this is a more difficult question then just asking which was different as "better" is somewhat subjective. I'd expect the number to be even lower than before.

I stole this design from market researchers who have been running this experiment using Cola for almost 30 years -- subjects as a whole have done no better than chance and the experiment has been run literally thousands of times.

Incidentally, be prepared to have people hate you for this... people do not like being wrong.