See this PCWorld article. They compare (somewhat naively) in double-blind test, using non-audiophile ears, AAC, RA, MP3 and WMA. They conclude that MP3 is useless bellow 96 or 128 kb/s (we knew that), that WMA is overall inferior (we suspected that), but, somewhat suprisingly, find RaalAudio the best overall (if just slightly).

In all fairness I must add that at very low bitrates (say, 16-32 kb/s samples from CDNOW), where the question is not whether one can distinguish compressed version from the real thing, but is compressed version listenable even to get an idea what the original sounds like, I found WMA sounding much better than RA (they didn't test for that).

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green