White Paper J200
Rich musical ringtones – 40 voices
The human ear can perceive sounds from approxi- mately 20 Hz up to 20 kHz. In most GSM mobile phones, the speech sound range is from 300 Hz to 3400 Hz, which is good enough for speaking, but quite poor for music. The J200 can handle up to more than 20 kHz, which means excellent sound quality.
The J200 has a dedicated speaker for ringtones and sounds, to ensure the best possible sound quality. This speaker is situated on the side of the phone, ensuring that no discomfort is felt if a sec- ond call is received during an ongoing call.
The quality of the sound heard from the speakers depends on many different things, for example on the synthesizer, the amplifier, or the speakers. An important factor for sound quality is the number of voices. The human ear cannot separate each voice if the number of voices increases above 16 or so, because then the voices merge together. But the nuances in music increase, and the music is expe- rienced as more sophisticated if the number of voices increases. Many modern sound modules in synthesizers used by musicians have 16, 24 or 32 note polyphony. The number of voices used in the J200 is 40, which gives rich musical ringtones.
Combined wavetable and FM sound synthesis
Sony Ericsson has chosen to implement a combi- nation of Wavetable (8 voices) and FM synthesis (32 voices), which consists of sampled real instru- ments (mainly percussion sounds) and generated synthetic tones.
22 | November 2004 |
