CH wrote:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...=AudioQuality#

and you'll hear a demo of Windows Media Audio 9 Voice codec of 8kbps
compared to a standard 8kbps codecs and the old one sounds real bad and
the new one sounds great.

I just checked out their demos of WMA9 versus MP3. Since the first selection was uncompressed WAV it played back through my RME and HD600s so loudly that I had to open up TotalMix to drop the headphone volume--at which point I noticed that (a) it was hitting overs every few seconds and (b) the meter was within a few DB of FS the whole time. This is a recording of an acoustic guitar, allegedly to be used for comparing the audio quality of music codecs! Second selection had the same problem. AAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHH!