Sennheiser to show 'CD quality' wireless 'phones

Headphones specialist Sennheiser will tomorrow show off a set of wireless earphones based on a technology it claims delivers true CD quality lossless sound in place of the compressed, lossy audio you get with Bluetooth 'phones. Sennheiser MXW1 wireless earphones Sennheiser's MXW1: 'phones... The MXW1 set uses audio …

[Tom Paris]

Garbage in - garbage out

CD quality?? I'm SURE I'm missing the point but aren't the songs on your iPod are already compessed in a lossly format and have already lost the CD quality...I dinna really fancy having to re-encode all my tracks again...and what bitrate do they come from the iTunes store...not CD quality I suspect...

[Anonymous Coward]

@Tom Paris

You are aware that there are other media players than iPods, right? Or... yeah, don't answer that.

By the way, great job piloting Voyager. She'd never have made it home without your skill at the helm...

[Dave]

too late for x-mas

damn, too late to ask for these for christmas.

They'll be out in time for my birthday tho. cus.. yeah.. thats gonna happen

I want some.

Hey tom! Ever heard of FLAC? Yes it is possible to play FLAC on pocket(ish) size music gizmos.

[Benjamin Lukoff]

media player isn't the point

The compression is. Who cares about CD-quality sound on the headphones when you don't have CD-quality sound on the player?

[Neil Hanson]

@ Tom Paris

Not if you rip your CDs properly (and by that I mean avoid the travesty that is Itunes) and use a good quality ripper like EAC and a good quality codec like LAME. A well-ripped MP3 of 256k bitrate or higher will generally be indistinguishable from a CD.

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPods and others support lossless formats

All iPods (except the Shuffle I believe) support at least one lossless format for true CD quality.

Most other (i.e. non-iPod) MP3 players also support one or more lossless formats. So while your pirated MP3s may not sound CD quality. Those of us that rip our own CDs in lossless format know true CD quality from our MP3 players. (BTW it would be nice if this plugged into the digital connector instead of the headphone jack, so we didn't go through the lossy D/A and A/D conversions for an even purer sound.)

Some lossless formats I can think of: FLAC, Apple Lossless, WMA Lossless.