Polyphonic Ringtones

Polyphonic ringtones offer ringtones with multiple instruments playing at the same time. The traditional monotonic “beeb” ringtones have only one instrument playing at one time.

Because polyphonic ringers have been popular, almost all the major handset manufacturers have them in virtually all of the models.

Also, because the Japanese and Korean manufacturers had a head-start in producing handsets with polyphonic sounds, they’ve been gaining market share in mobile entertainment cell phone markets.

Furthermore, because the Japanese i-Mode cell phones have been using polyphonic ringers for years, you’ll find much of the content to be from Japanese manufacturers.

In fact, because most of the polyphonic ringing tones are based on MIDI format, many Japanese karaoke-machine companies made their large selection of tunes available to mobile phones.

That’s probably why you’ll feel like singing when you hear a polyphonic ringer :-)

How Can YOU Get Polyphonic Ringtones

If you’d like to experience the quality of polyphonic ringers and impress folks used to the old monotonic ringing tones, you need a handset capable of polyphonic ring tones.

However, all polyphonic ring tone cell phones are NOT capable of downloading new ringers to the phone, so you should check this if this capability exists for your phone (and cell phone plan).

What you're likely to find in many polyphonic ringing tone capable phones is that most of these phones also support real music ringtones, such as MP3 ringers.

Differences In Polyphonic Ringtones

In principle, a ringtone with 2 instruments playing at the same time could be called a polyphonic ringer.

The general idea is that the more instruments play at the same time for a polyphonic ringer, the better sounding it is.

Most of the cell phones with polyphonic MIDI ringtones have between 16 and 32 instruments playing at the same time. However, the best polyphonic cell phones in this regard have the Yamaha MA-3 MIDI chipset for ringtones (supports 40 chord ringtones).

The next step in quality is offered by WAV, MP3, and AAC ringtones, which are just snippets of high quality real music from your favorite artists.

Polyphonic Ringer Cell Phones

Most of the major cell phone manufacturers have current phone models with polyphonic ringers. If you also need a cell phone plan with the cell phone, chances are that you can find a cell phone with polyphonic ringers for free (after rebates).

In addition, if you specifically want to have a cell phone with downloadable polyphonic ringers, you need to check if the polyphonic cell phone and your cell phone plan support these downloads.