Easier said than done.
Well, obviously I appreciate the incredible amount of work that Synthetic Soul has put into his tests and precedures. However, it is also possible to provide useful information on different systems with virtually no work. For example, here are results from my system using just a single track. I always do a couple test runs (not shown) to make sure the sources are in disk cache and I either write the output to "nul" for encoding or just use verify mode for decoding to make sure that no disk I/O is entering the timing. I get results like this:
Decoding test (sorry, you have to scroll a little to see the differences):C:\devel\opt\trunk>wvunpack -v Track01*
WVUNPACK Hybrid Lossless Audio Decompressor Win32 Version 4.40.0
Copyright © 1998 - 2006 Conifer Software. All Rights Reserved.
Track01hh.wv:
verified Track01hh.wv in 8.23 secs (lossless, 39.69%)
Track01f.wv:
verified Track01f.wv in 3.88 secs (lossless, 37.35%)
Track01.wv:
verified Track01.wv in 4.86 secs (lossless, 38.31%)
Track01ff.wv:
verified Track01ff.wv in 3.82 secs (lossless, 36.78%)
Track01hx.wv:
verified Track01hx.wv in 6.38 secs (lossless, 39.46%)
**** 5 files successfully processed ****
C:\devel\opt\trunk>release\wvunpack -v Track01*
WVUNPACK Hybrid Lossless Audio Decompressor Win32 Version 4.41.0-beta
Copyright © 1998 - 2006 Conifer Software. All Rights Reserved.
Track01hh.wv:
verified Track01hh.wv in 7.35 secs (lossless, 39.69%)
Track01f.wv:
verified Track01f.wv in 3.34 secs (lossless, 37.35%)
Track01.wv:
verified Track01.wv in 4.14 secs (lossless, 38.31%)
Track01ff.wv:
verified Track01ff.wv in 3.33 secs (lossless, 36.78%)
Track01hx.wv:
verified Track01hx.wv in 5.66 secs (lossless, 39.46%)
**** 5 files successfully processed ****
Encoding test:C:\devel\opt\trunk>wavpack -fy Track01 nul
WAVPACK Hybrid Lossless Audio Compressor Win32 Version 4.40.0
Copyright © 1998 - 2006 Conifer Software. All Rights Reserved.
created nul.wv in 4.98 secs (lossless, 37.35%)
C:\devel\opt\trunk>release\wavpack -fy Track01 nul
WAVPACK Hybrid Lossless Audio Compressor Win32 Version 4.41.0-beta
Copyright © 1998 - 2006 Conifer Software. All Rights Reserved.
created nul.wv in 4.37 secs (lossless, 37.35%)
C:\devel\opt\trunk>wavpack -hhy Track01 nul
WAVPACK Hybrid Lossless Audio Compressor Win32 Version 4.40.0
Copyright © 1998 - 2006 Conifer Software. All Rights Reserved.
created nul.wv in 13.43 secs (lossless, 39.55%)
C:\devel\opt\trunk>release\wavpack -hhy Track01 nul
WAVPACK Hybrid Lossless Audio Compressor Win32 Version 4.41.0-beta
Copyright © 1998 - 2006 Conifer Software. All Rights Reserved.
created nul.wv in 10.19 secs (lossless, 39.55%)
C:\devel\opt\trunk>wavpack -hhxy Track01 nul
WAVPACK Hybrid Lossless Audio Compressor Win32 Version 4.40.0
Copyright © 1998 - 2006 Conifer Software. All Rights Reserved.
created nul.wv in 22.36 secs (lossless, 39.64%)
C:\devel\opt\trunk>release\wavpack -hhxy Track01 nul
WAVPACK Hybrid Lossless Audio Compressor Win32 Version 4.41.0-beta
Copyright © 1998 - 2006 Conifer Software. All Rights Reserved.
created nul.wv in 18.27 secs (lossless, 39.64%)
Finally, when I want to verify that I haven't broken anything I just pipe the output to md5:
C:\devel\opt\trunk>release\wavpack -hhy Track01 -q - | md5 -
3EA3537450C0189192174CAFAA6CA506 -
C:\devel\opt\trunk>wavpack -hhy Track01 -q - | md5 -
3EA3537450C0189192174CAFAA6CA506 -
Hopefully someone will get results somewhat like mine, otherwise I spent all that time optimizing for a single computer!