With all the debates on various forums about possible audible differences between lossless formats an obvious question is why not use Foobar and do a ABX test.
At least the subjective part (the expectation bias) is removed from the equation by doing this.
It is hard to find exact documentation on the Internet about how Foobar ABX comparator works.
I understand it convert all audio to 32 bit PCM files first and then randomize them.
Great, you have 2 WAV files you can’t identify so indeed a blind test.
Not so great: if the hypothesis is that differences in sound quality between WAV and FLAC are due to the computational effort required during conversion to raw PCM, this ABX test won’t help as you are comparing bit identical raw PCM to raw PCM.
http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/archive/index.php/t-265346-p-2.html
At least the subjective part (the expectation bias) is removed from the equation by doing this.
It is hard to find exact documentation on the Internet about how Foobar ABX comparator works.
I understand it convert all audio to 32 bit PCM files first and then randomize them.
Great, you have 2 WAV files you can’t identify so indeed a blind test.
Not so great: if the hypothesis is that differences in sound quality between WAV and FLAC are due to the computational effort required during conversion to raw PCM, this ABX test won’t help as you are comparing bit identical raw PCM to raw PCM.
http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/archive/index.php/t-265346-p-2.html