How small a flaw can you hear?

Three kinds of damage, one per session. Each test walks the flaw down until you stop being sure, and gives you the size where that happened — a physical quantity, not a score.

• Pitch drift

  the whole track sliding slowly out of tune across twenty seconds

  ~14 min · 11 rungs · 3.1 cents to 100 centsStart →

• Timing smear

  the beat wandering off the grid and back again

  ~20 min · 10 rungs · 12.5 ms to 100 msStart →

• Compression damage

  the smear a low bitrate leaves on cymbals and reverb tails

  ~26 min · 9 rungs · 32 kbps to 160 kbpsStart →

Free · no sign-up · headphones required, not advised — laptop speakers cannot reproduce most of what this measures.

What this instrument cannot do. Every limit we measured and could not fix.