Oh, yeah, it’s Mono too. heh.
Soooo, if you thought it was an MP3 at first - it must not have sounded 'lame' to you, right? Lol!
I can understand that if you are in a quiet room listening to music you will want the sound to be excellent quality. If you are out jogging, walking or riding in a car the quality is not as obvious or necessary, I think.
But - I could be wrong!!
It’s what I said in 89. WAV isn’t a format itself, but a container for audio, although mostly used to store uncompressed audio in PCM format. But it can also store an MP3 audio stream as yours does, and in that case you might as well have an MP3 file.
I saw it was mono, but you’re also using half the bit rate of a CD there. It is a 24 Kb/sec MP3, so 175 KB/minute, sounds about right for your file sizes. But since you’re doing mono the bitrate is the equivalent of a 48 Kb/sec stereo MP3 for quality. Normally below 128 Kb/sec in stereo (64 Kb/sec mono) distortion gets really bad as the compression tries to squeeze all the audio in that tiny bitstream; however, you’re using half the sampling rate so you’ll get less distortion (less data to squeeze) but can only reproduce up to 11,000 Hz frequencies according to the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.