Siden Apples iPod er rett rundt hjørnet også i Norge, kan det være interessant å vite at kvaliteten på musikken man laster ned er langt dårligere enn på CD.

Grunnen er at musikk i fullformat tar opp mye plass. For å spare plass og tid til nedlasting har Apple innført en kompresjonsteknologi som fjerner mye av informasjonen. Man stripper musikken ned til beinet, og rekonstruerer den når den spilles av. Men i iPods tilfelle er resultatet likevel langt dårligere enn originalutgaven på CD. Det kommer nok som en stor overraskelse/skuffelse til alle som gleder seg til den digitale revolusjonen.

Love the iPod, but don’t jump too hastily to fill it with thousands of dollars of iTunes. The tracks are not carbon copies of the CD originals, but compressed versions. The smaller files are handy for speedy downloads, space-saving for storage and perfectly serviceable for listening through ear buds when riding on the subway. Not what you will want, however, when your desktop computer becomes the home jukebox and wirelessly sends these simulacra to the entertainment center in the living room.

Customers are led to believe that they are getting a CD in all respects except the trouble of going to the mall. The iTunes store does not warn about the permanence of its method of compression; once freeze-dried, there is no way to reconstitute the music into CD quality for playing through a good stereo.

Ah, for simpler times, when we never had reason to look up the bit rate at which music is digitally sampled for CD’s: 1,378 kilobits per second. The bit rate for iTunes, 128, is so low that when played side by side against the original, the difference is audible not only to audio enthusiasts, but also to mortals with ordinary hearing. Wes Phillips, contributing editor at Stereophile, says «128 is like an eight-track,» and he describes the combination of iPod and iTunes as «buying a 21st-century device to live in the 1970’s.»