Audio Files - WAV (Highly Compressible)

Compression Rate

In this test of highly compressible WAV files, the relatively unknown trio of SBC Archiver, WinRK and Squeez remained at the top three places by compressing the fileset to just over 108MB. However, they only managed to further improve their compression rate very slightly. In fact, WinRK actually suffered from a slightly poorer compression rate.

Current favourites like WinRAR, WinAce and StuffIt also showed small improvements in this fileset, even after being set to their maximum settings. However, WinZip showed a tremendous boost in performance. It ended up slightly better than WinAce and WinRAR in this fileset. The other compressors did not do well at the fileset, registering very poor compression rates of 10-15%.

Compression Speed

When it comes to compression speed, however, things were quite different. The two poorest compressors, ARJ32 and gzip were the two fastest compressors. gzip was the fastest by far, achieving a compression speed of over 10MB/s while ARJ32 achieved about 8.6MB/s.

WinZip and Squeez were also fast, managing compression speeds of 7.7MB/s and 6.6MB/s respectively. The trio of bzip2, WinRAR and StuffIt were much slower at compression, but they were still reasonably fast, compared to the remaining data compressors.

The compression king in the category, SBC Archiver, proved to be relatively fast at the task, at over 2.2MB/s. While it isn't particularly fast, it is much faster than we expected. In contrast, WinRK, which did almost as well as SBC Archiver at compressing these files, was far slower. In fact, with a maximum compression speed of only 688KB/s, it was the slowest compressor in this fileset.

Compression Efficiency

The compression efficiency rating is a simple way to evaluate the efficiency of each data compressor. This way, we can see which compressor can save the most space in the least time.

Please note that a higher efficiency rating does not mean the compressor is better. It just means the compressor has a better compression-to-speed ratio. A more efficient compressor is, of course, always more desirable than a less efficient one.

The most efficient data compressors when it came to WAV files was Squeez. Its tremendous compression rate, third only to SBC Archiver and WinRK, combined with a really fast compression speed allowed it to become the undisputed efficiency champion.

Close behind it was WinZip, which at these settings, proved to be a very able compressor. It had a good compression rate and a really fast compression speed. Little wonder it was close to Squeez in efficiency. In contrast, WinRAR which had a similar compression performance as WinZip was much slower. This relegated it to a distant third spot.

The WAV compression king, SBC Archiver, only managed to stay in the middle of the pack as far as efficiency was concerned. Although it was the best compressor of the bunch, its small performance advantage could not make up for its relatively slow compression speed.

WinRK and 7-Zip were the most inefficient compressors in this fileset. WinRK had a really good compression rate but was exceedingly slow. 7-Zip, on the other hand, had a poor compression ratio and was slow at the job.