Comment Subjective audio comparisons are useless (Score 2) 277
It is impossible to judge audio codecs through subjective tests.
Companies that manufacture loudspeakers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on audio quality research- not in order to make their speakers better, but to understand the psychology behind the sounds that make people choose speaker A over speaker B in a showroom. They have discovered all sorts of quirks in human psychology and perception that they exploit to boost their sales, and they have little to do with overall 'quality'. Decades of expensive, meticulous, scientifically valid studies are responsible for the range of speakers you find at the average hifi shop, and even when several identical speakers are demonstrated (but the listener is told they are all different) most people will say that speaker number 2 sounds the best.
The same applies to audio codecs. Even if you eliminate all sorts of hardware variables, then just listening to clip A, then B, then C and subjectively deciding which one sounds 'best' is totally unreliable. The results of this type of testing are completely useless. At the very least you would need to set up a triangle test, and to do this properly with 6 codecs in a controlled environment would take a very long time and the results still wouldn't correlate with true 'quality' unless it was repeated many times with different hardware setups.
Ignoring the psychological weaknesses in these types of tests, the playback hardware would colour the sound enough as to make the underlying test - the codec - invalid. The choice of music, the amplifier, the speakers or headphones, and the volume used for playback will all contribute their own distinctive characteristics to the audio so that person A will not be hearing the same test as person B.
Forget codec wars. Just buy a decent pair of earphones.