Project Plan

Purpose:

Can the average consumer perceive the difference between high fidelity analog recording and compressed digital formats?

Hypothesis:

If we present a subject with a blind sample of the same audio recording on two different formats then it is assumed that they will be able to notice a difference and prefer the higher fidelity audio recording. The reason being that there is not the distortion caused by clipping when an analog source is converted to digital.

Materials:

-High-fidelity recording headphones

-Computer

-Quality analog recording (format: long playing record)

-Associated record player

-blindfold

-coin (for randomization)

Procedure:

-Acquire a sample pool of subjects, have a mix of age and gender.

-Induce the subject to be blindfolded

-flip the coin to decide if the MP3 format or the record will be played first.

-play the recordings back to back to the subject.

-Ask the subject which format A or B he/she preferred

-Ask the subject to guess which of the two recording was on the higher quality

-Repeat this process for all members of your subject pool.

-Compare the data