(axlq) wrote in message ...

But those artifacts may not be audible on an "audio system" that
consists of an audio signal of narrow bandwidth and a tinny speaker
of narrow bandwidth. I imagine there's a lot of information one
could cut out without much loss to what one actually hears.

The artifacts can get especially ugly when transcoding.

Try this one for example:

wave - gsm - wave - mp3

....you'll hear some truly bizarre chirping and gurgling sounds at
times so it appears sticking with one codec would result in the best
quality--with "best" being a relative quantity when such low bitrates
are involved. =)

GSM used to transmit speech does have its issues. For example, look
at the http://atnac2003.atcrc.com/POSTERS/Chong.pdf file. Considering
that various Chinese phonemes may get mangled in some cases (!), music
remaining aesthetically pleasing probably doesn't stand much of a
chance.

-t