841: Audiophiles

Alt text:For years, I took the wrong lesson from that Monster Cable experiment and only listened to my music through alligator-clipped coat hangers

Explanation

The joke centers around the fact that the higher the data stream rate of the sound, the better the sound will, well, sound. This is obvious when it comes to video files, but less so when it comes to sound. Almost everyone knows that a 1080p video picture has better resolution than a 480p picture, because the 1080p image has thousands and thousands more pixels in it. And with this higher picture resolution or "quality" there's a direct relationship to the amount of data contained in the picture. For this reason, online video pictures are generally of much worse quality than your HD-TV, because streaming all that data is hard work for the internet, so they stream a lousy quality picture in order to move all that picture information in a timely manner. Cell phones are to sound what a bad website is to video; it moves just enough information to get the point across without being a stunning reproduction of standing next to the action. For reference, the data rate from listening to an audio CD is 150 KBPS, over 12 times better than a cell phone.