The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Digital Domain: From a High-Tech System, Low-Fi Music: "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."

Defending the company's decision to encode its music at the low end of the bit rate range, an Apple spokesman, Derick Mains, says 128 provides good sound quality, "especially when used in iPods."
Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, has long held that inferior quality will eventually manifest itself. A number of years ago, he recalled that when he was growing up, a neighbor across the street had tried to make a Volkswagen Bug into a Porsche through unstinting investments in accessories. When the neighbor was done, however, Mr. Jobs said, "he did not have a Porsche; he had a loud, ugly VW."