The true test is the short demo track tests (Jingle & Vibes_Bass). They were controlled, all aspects between the tracks were repeated in the same fashion, and burned to the same CD-RW. The music test (an edited sample of George Harrison's "Dhera Dun") was thrown in last minute, just out of curiousity to see what difference "real music" makes.
One file was extracted from a CD-RW recorded on an LG burner, which is the Belt-treated burner, the other was taken from a CD-R recorded a week before on a Plextor burner (a better quality burner than the LG), which was completely untreated. Many other differences exist between these two versions; the LG recording was done with Nero, the Plextor version was done with Feurio!. Finally, both versions were compressed to MP3Pro format and trimmed down to 1 min. in Nero WaveEdit.
You'll notice less differences between the Dehra Dun examples than the demo tracks. Reason being the demo's are more direct, whereas the Harrison track went through many steps, including extraction from CD and then compression into MP3Pro format. In both the cases of the Dhera Dun tracks and the Demo tracks, the original versions that I heard exhibited FAR greater differences than what you may hear after they have all been compressed to MP3, downloaded and all the rest.
Still, I feel there should be enough resolution left after all this processing to still hear at least some sort of differences beteen each version of the music track. In order to ensure more success at hearing these differences, you should play them back on good quality headphones. (n.b I noticed one track was slightly longer than the other. Don't ask me why, since Nero was used in the extraction for both!)
Oh, what were on the photographs? Well, one was a picture of the planet Earth, similar to the one above. One was a picture of my girlfriend, one a picture of one of the pairs of speakers I own, and another one of Homer Simpson and his father, Granpa Simpson. I haven't actually gotten around to testing the efficacy of the pictures themselves, so I don't yet know which ones sound better than which other ones....
