Audio Files - WAV (Highly Compressible)

Compression Rate

In this test of highly compressible WAV files, we can see the power of the multimedia compression algorithms used in the newer compressors. The relatively unknown trio of SBC Archiver, WinRK and Squeez took the top three places by compressing the fileset to just over 108MB. That translates into an incredible reductions in size of 44-46%.

Current favourites like WinRAR and WinAce did reasonably well in this test, reducing the fileset size by about 35%. Compressors whose algorithms have not been updated for ages, like WinZip, gzip and ARJ32 did poorly. They only managed to reduce the fileset's size by a meager 10.5%.

Compression Speed

When it comes to compression speed, however, things were quite different. The three poorest compressors, WinZip, ARJ32 and gzip were the three fastest compressors. gzip was the fastest by far, achieving a compression speed of over 13MB/s. ARJ32 and WinZip both achieved about 9MB/s, still remarkable compared to the other compressors in the comparison.

Surprisingly, the compression king in the category, SBC Archiver, proved to be reasonably fast at the task, at almost 4.5MB/s. This would certainly make it a very efficient compressor of this fileset. WinRK, which did almost as well as SBC Archiver at compressing these files, was however far slower. In fact, with a maximum compression speed of 1.67MB/s, it was the slowest compressor in this compression.

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 its fast compression speed allowed Squeez to become the undisputed efficiency champion. It was over 50% as efficient as its nearest competitor, SBC Archiver.

The WAV compression king, SBC Archiver, only managed a rather distant second place because it was much slower than Squeez while attaining only a slightly higher compression rate. However, it was four times more efficient than 7-Zip, which had the dubious honour of being the most efficient compressor of WAV files. 7-Zip's mediocre compression rate of 15.6%, coupled with its mediocre compression speed of 3.1MB/s made it the most inefficient compressor of the bunch.