Being engineer types, we spent a little while trying to figure out what could possibly change in the audio signal that could cause a change in the apparent _height_ of a voice. Can any of you audiophiles shed some light on this one?

It sounds like you're the only one who's actually done a direct A/B comparison and listened for soundstaging changes. My take is that a difference in frequency response might explain it. As you noted, MP3 discards ultra high frequency data. I'd love to see the same A/B test done with a straight .WAV file.

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Tony Fabris