"..Microsoft Corp. announced today a new consumer study that proves digital music in the Microsoft Windows Media Format sounds more like CD-quality audio in half the size of MP3. ZD Labs conducted a study that compared Windows Media- and MP3-formatted content to original CD recordings. The study found that when compared to the CD-quality originals, nearly 90 percent of consumers tested preferred or could not tell the difference in quality between music in the Windows Media Format and songs in the MP3 format that were twice the size. In addition, this study revealed that consumers overwhelmingly chose the quality of Windows Media for live streaming of audio at 32k bps and at 64k bps over MP3.

The ZD Labs report stated that "the test participants chose the Windows Media Audio codec over the RealNetworks/Xing MP3 codec in all our major test scenarios.'' The ZD Labs study tested two major consumer usage scenarios. During the first test scenario, participants listened to a live streaming-quality usage scenario, which included listening to Internet radio, live music events over the Internet, and Web-based jukeboxes. Results showed that 97.6 percent of test participants responded that the music created with the Windows Media Audio codec sounded more like the original than the music created with the RealNetworks/Xing MP3 codec.." NULL