Lossless audio codec comparison revision 6 - CDDA part

Introduction

This document compares the performance of lossless audio codecs on CDDA material, which are PCM audio files with a bit depth of 16 bit per sample and a samplerate of 44.1kHz.

The test corpus consists of 64 sources of very different sound. An attempt was made to create a balanced though extensive set covering many possible sounds. While most sources contain music, not all do. The test corpus has not changed since the previous CDDA comparison, revision 5, part 3.

Method

The method of testing is explained in here. As all codecs are able to handle CDDA, no codecs are omitted.

Results (PDF)

• Average of all CDDA sources
• Results per source, PDF, CSV

The best results will be obtained in the bottom left corner of the graphs: this represents the best compression (smallest file size) and the lowest CPU-usage (fastest compression and/or decompression).

In the graph each codec is represented by a group of markers connected by a line. Each combination of settings as mentioned in the previous table corresponds to one marker, in the order listed in the table. The first combination of settings is (usually) the fastest and the last the slowest. Therefore, the marker closest to the upper left corner of the graph corresponds to the first listed combination of settings, and the marker closest to the lower right corner corresponds to the last listed combination of settings.

Discussion

Compared with the previous CDDA comparison, revision 5, part 3, the performance of most codecs hasn't changed. FLAC and TAK are relatively faster at decoding, but this is probably due to the different CPU used. WavPack seems to be relatively slow on this CPU. FLAC got slightly better compression.