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By Jason Parker 5/24/05


Everyone wants his or her digital music to sound crystal-clear. Aside from having an MP3 player with a strong signal-to-noise ratio--and high-performance headphones--the audio codec you choose plays a role in how good different types of music sound. But just how big of a role?

The term codec comes from a combination of the words compression and decompression. Each codec offers a different method for compressing audio, resulting in varying qualities of sound. Some codecs, such as FLAC, are described as lossless because they retain the true multitude of sounds in a given audio track. As such, lossless codecs tend to be bigger files. On the other hand, so-called lossy codecs pick up all the main elements of the track but don't get every little nuance. In most cases, lossy codecs do the job quite well; for instance, MP3 (the most commonly used lossy codec) is perfectly adequate for most everyday listeners.

To thoroughly test the sound quality of the most popular lossy codecs--and hopefully settle some watercooler debates--we assembled a jury of eight golden-eared employees from different departments at CNET. We then brought them to the CNET radio station and played five handpicked songs from different musical styles: acoustic guitar, rock, rap, pop, and jazz. They listened to each tune encoded in the most-popular lossy codecs: AAC, MP3, OGG, and WMA. Since each song was ripped at both 128Kbps and the supposedly higher-quality 192Kbps bit rates, the jury listened to a total of eight compressed files per genre. An uncompressed WAV was used as the control file and periodically replayed at jury request.

Of course, our results aren't scientific, and if you tried a similar test with your friends, you might get drastically different results. However, without further ado, here are our suggestions for the best codecs and bit rates for each type of music.

See the winners >>


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