Recent work has shown that in auditory cortex acoustic stimuli are potentially encoded by different neural codes, each operating on different temporal scales. For example, the millisecond- precise timing of individual neurons action potentials has been implicated similarly as firing rate modulations on slower scales or the timing of spikes to ongoing oscillatory background activity [1]. Here we asked whether the temporal precision of these putative neural codes is fixed and inherent to the system, or whether their temporal precision is determined by the acoustic stimulus. Stimulus information in different codes was compared during stimulation with naturalistic sounds and sequences of random tones. The natural sounds had a typical autocorrelation of around 2030 ms (computed from the envelope of individual frequency bands), while random tones had a much shorter autocorrelation time (around 10 ms). Neural activity was recorded using multiple electrodes in primary and secondary auditory cortex of macaque monkeys passively listening to these stimuli. Mutual information between stimulus and neural activity was characterized using previously established approaches [2,3]. We found that the precise time scale of each code depends on the acoustic stimulus. For binary spike words (spike timing), the temporal precision required to decode maximal information was higher during stimulation with random tones (average 7 ms) than with natural sounds (average 12 ms). In addition, the degree to which field potentials were stimulus locked (‘entrained’) varied between sound types: during stimulation with random tones entrainment was stro