Corus stations in Montreal, including 940 Hits and Q92, have started streaming online feeds from their stations in Dolby AAC format, judging that 128kbps MP3 is just too lossy for the picky tastes of their listeners.
Listeners won’t notice any difference at all, since the streaming is done through a flash player and only the most insanely picky of audiophiles will think high-quality MP3 is too lossy. And those people won’t be listening to the crap music that comes out of 940 or Q92.
AAC just yields smaller file sizes because its more effecient compresser.
That’s because only AAC can reproduce the high sound fidelity that we’ve all grown used to from AM broadcasting.
As I understand, streaming in AAC is royalty-free, but streaming in MP3 does not. So in addition to being a more advanced codec with better compression and fidelity, it’s cheaper. So why are we complaining?