The audio was identical. The benchmark numbers changed.

Repeating a benchmark can reveal measurement instability without changing the model output. This five-profile Chatterbox Turbo rerun preserved all thirty comparison WAVs byte for byte.

A useful repeat

Repeating a benchmark can reveal measurement instability without changing the model output. This five-profile Chatterbox Turbo rerun preserved all thirty comparison WAVs byte for byte.

Faster timings, same speech

With Low Power Mode off, warm medians were 2.861 seconds for the original, 1.535 for community 6-bit, 1.489 for oQ6, 1.445 for oQ5 and 1.389 for oQ4. The controlled similarity and storage results remained attached to the same audio.

Four ASR transcripts changed between the earlier CUDA recognizer and this CPU environment. Consequently, some reported WER differences reflect the evaluator, rather than a new speech waveform. Power and background-resource conditions also changed, preventing a clean causal claim about the timing improvement.

The lesson

Freeze the generated artifacts as well as the text. Waveform hashes help distinguish a changed system output from a changed measurement. Community 6-bit remained the provisional fidelity/speed candidate, and oQ6 the closest of the oQ variants, with the same small-corpus limits.

Evidence and publication boundary

This is an edited account of the recorded experiment. The linked archive is private; the methods, aggregate findings and limits are included above. Reference recordings, raw conversations, authentication material and workstation configuration are excluded.