Nokia music phones sound as good as a CD, says the Advertising Standards Agency (and which is reported by The Register). Responding to a complaint "that the AAC lossy compression used by Nokia is not CD quality." It all hinged on the ISO survey "Report on the MPEG-2 AAC Stereo Verification Tests, [which] found listeners largely unable to distinguish between the two, [so] 128Kbps AAC could be said to be of CD quality." Which will be music to the ears of the PR departments, but be ready for the audiophiles to recoil in horror.
Read on in the full article.
This is very interesting, and I would argue that it's good news for most of us and bad news for the tiny percentage of the population who <i>can</i> tell the difference between 128kbs and 192kbs in normal use. Another of my interests is DAB radio and unfortunately there the story is different. The audio buffs kicked up a hell of a stink because most stations are broadcasting at the former instead of the latter. By doing that they can transmit more stations, but the audio buffs don't care about that and have been going around posturing and saying how bad DAB is. By doing so they've held back uptake and development. (Broadcast music is subject to a whole load of other flattening and compression anyway so the argument is largely irrelevant, but that doesn't stop them.)
[end of rant]
The key word is presumably "normal use".
Even if you could tell the difference when listening in a "perfect" environment, you certainly wouldn't while traveling on a train or any of the other public places where you would listen to a portable music device
My requirement is idealy isolation, and if not, VOLUME.
Well... I have sympathy for the audio buffs because technically they're right, if you say something is CD quality that ought to mean it delivers an experience identical to a CD, whether you're an average member of the public or a stereo enthusiast.
But more interesting is the light this casts on claims by reviewers that there are huge differences between different audio standards. In the real world people don't notice that much difference between audio devices, and things like ease of use and price have a much bigger impact on how much they want to buy a music player or music phone.
Ok well i'm definately not an audiophile so i risk embarrassing myself with this question...Does the same apply to m4a that nokia offers as another format? What is actually the story with m4a?
natanlevine:
MP4 is a file format to store audio/video streams (i.e. a video file format)
m4a or MP4a is the audio part of the MP4 format (i.e. an audio file format)
AAC is the actual encoding used to encode the audio stored in an m4a file.
So unless you're talking with a specialist who knows what they're talking about, when somebody tells you about AAC files, they actually mean m4a files.
Too bad that Nokia devices can't play tracks gaplessly.