From what I have been told by my father in law it sounds very digitized on his implant. I think it takes some level of therapy for the brain to build the pathways for it to not sound like a jumble of noise anyways and actually interpret speech. It is incapable of really giving the richness of music or other forms of noises. Interestingly enough his implant can connect to bluetooth so if he wanted to he can listen to podcasts.