However, I feel this will make only a subtle difference, compared to the difference between using different bitrates.

Also bear in mind that the subject in question is part of my Electrical Engineering course, and I’ve been seeking fellow students to do the test. Not all of these people are as computer literate as one might assume. In addition to this, I personally have no idea what sort of sound card is soldered onto the motherboards of the university computers. So there’s all sorts of issues in trying to collect this information.

Probably worth noting, is that I’ve also used analytical methods to assess the quality, namely the humble FFT, which allowed me to calculate the level of attenuation in different frequency bands. This project is more than just audio quality, I’m also looking at encoding time, decoding time (CPU time that is), compression ratios…etc. These tests were conducted on my P4M 1.7GHz laptop, under controlled conditions.

On using Safari for the test… you should be able to use QuickTime if you install the XiphQt extension . You may also be able to coax MPlayer Plug-in to work (Mac OS X being a Unix clone), but I don’t know what Safari’s compatability is with Netscape plugins (being KHTML-based, they may work though).

I am a sound engineer with a lot of experience with audio codeds and if anyone can tell you anything about your files, I can. However, I don’t think that dwonloading the files and allowing the end user to play the file back in a random player is a good idea as players render the file in different ways. You have also made no provision for sound cards and the fact that some sound cards filter playback – audio drivers, multimedia drivers render audio in a different way to directx drivers and what about Apple computers, Linux users et al. I would love to participate – but you need a better test!!!