Advertising Complaint Against Nokia Rejected

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has rejected a complaint about recent Nokia adverts which had claimed that the Nokia 5300 could offer "CD Quality Sound" on its music playback feature. Nokia's advertising agency, Grey London, responded on their behalf. They said the bit rate did not on its own determine the level of audio quality; the only relevant test was a listener test, which compared samples with an original CD recording.

They provided the International Standards Organisations (ISO) "Report on the MPEG-2 AAC Stereo Verification Tests", in which subjective listener tests had been carried out to determine whether listeners could distinguish between original and compressed samples.

Grey London said the subjective listening test results indicated that MPEG-2 AAC LC at 128 kbps samples provided sound quality which was comparable to that of the original CD, even for expert listeners. They said MPEG-4 AAC LC had exactly the same performance as MPEG-2 AAC LC at bit rates of 160 and therefore MPEG-4 AAC LC at 160 kbps provided sound quality comparable to that of a CD.

The ASA said that while it noted the complainant believed the claim "CD quality sound" was misleading, because compressed music files were not the same quality as music files on CD, which had a bit rate of 1411 kbps.

However, they also noted the ISO report had found that listeners had been unable to distinguish between compressed AAC files encoded at 128kbps and CD sound. The test results showed that AAC encoding at 128kbps was indistinguishable from CD sound.

The ASA says that it considered that readers would interpret the claim "CD quality sound" to mean that when they listened to files played on the Nokia XpressMusic the sound would be indistinguishable from CD sound, and that Nokia had substantiated the claim "CD quality sound" and it was unlikely to mislead. "

Posted to the site on 26th April 2007