STANDARD OF TASTE

How small a flaw can you still hear?

Every pair is the same twenty seconds of music twice, and one of them has been damaged — the smear a low bitrate leaves on cymbals and reverb tails. Pick the damaged one. Get it right twice and the damage gets smaller; get it wrong and it gets bigger again.

The test walks down until it finds the size where you stop being sure. That size is your answer, and it is a real physical quantity — not a score out of ten.

This session locks to a single recording, named at the top of every trial and on your result. A bitrate does different damage to different music, so the number means nothing without the material it was measured on.

If you have measured this in this browser before, the retest reuses the same recording, so the two sittings can be compared — no account, nothing on a server. Clearing your browsing data starts you on a fresh one.

~26 minutes. No sign-up. Headphones strongly advised — laptop speakers cannot reproduce most of what this measures.