Personally, I can’t tell 128k AAC files apart from the originals. I had a hunch that most other people can’t either, but I decided to write up an informal listening test to find out. To make sure I got a lot of responses, I put it up on Digg . Well, hundreds of gigs of transfer and ten of thousands of votes later the results are in: turns out most people can’t tell.

This was an interesting experiment for me. Not so much because of the music results. I know that 128k AAC is pretty good, and I knew that before. It’s interesting to see an application that I built weather a number one spot in the Digg top 10. Rails managed to serve up hundreds of page requests a second without a hiccup. Of course, it was a very simple app. There weren’t many database calls and I wasn’t serving up any images, but it was also hosted on my home box and remained as speedy as ever the entire time. Amazon’s great S3 service was also a joy to use and obviously took the brunt of the onslaught.

Even so, I think that’s the last time I’ll do anything like that. I had no idea the kind of bandwidth Digg users could suck down if given half the chance!