ASA Adjudication on Nokia UK Ltd

Ad

A series of posters, for the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic, all of which stated "Up to 1500 tracks*, CD quality sound".

Issue

The complainant challenged whether the claim "CD quality sound" was misleading and could be substantiated.

CAP Code (Edition 11)

Response

Nokias agency, Grey London, responded on their behalf. They said the claim "CD quality sound" referred to the fact that the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic supported the playback of Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) files encoded at bit rates above 160kbps. The product also came with software which encoded CD tracks using MPEG-4 AAC Low Complexity (LC) at 160kbps with an encoder using 16 bits.

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.

Assessment

Not upheld

We 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, we noted the ISO report had found that listeners had been unable to distinguish between compressed AAC files encoded at 128kbps and CD sound. We also noted the published results from controlled listening tests carried out by the Communications Research Centre, which compared audio codecs with CD sound. The test results showed that AAC encoding at 128kbps was indistinguishable from CD sound. We noted the Nokia XpressMusic supported playback of AAC files encoded at the higher bit rate of 160kbps.

We 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. We considered the tests provided proved that most listeners were unable to distinguish between compressed AAC files encoded at 128kbps and CD sound. We concluded that Nokia had substantiated the claim "CD quality sound" and it was unlikely to mislead.

We investigated the ads under CAP Code clauses 3.1 (Substantiation) and 7.1 (Truthfulness) but did not find them in breach.

Action

No further action required.

Adjudication of the ASA Council (Non-broadcast)