WMAP observations have accurately determined the position of the first two peaks and dips in the CMB temperature power spectrum. These encode information on the ratio of the distance to the last scattering surface to the sound horizon at decoupling. However pre-recombination processes can contaminate this distance information. In order to assess the amplitude of these effects we use the WMAP data and evaluate the relative differences of the CMB peaks and dips multipoles. We find that the position of the first peak is largely displaced with the respect to the expected position of the sound horizon scale at decoupling. In contrast the relative spacings of the higher extrema are statistically consistent with those expected from perfect harmonic oscillations. This provides evidence for a scale dependent phase shift of the CMB oscillations which is caused by gravitational driving forces affecting the propagation of sound waves before recombination. By accounting for these effects we have performed a MCMC likelihood analysis to constrain in combination with recent BAO data a constant dark energy equation w. For a flat universe we find at 95% upper limit w<-1.10, and including the HST prior w<-1.14, which are only marginally consistent with limits derived from the supernova SNLS sample. Larger limits are obtained for non-flat cosmologies. From the full CMB likelihood analysis we also estimate the values of the shift parameter R and the multipole l_a of the acoustic horizon at decoupling for several cosmologies to test their dependence on model assumptions. Although the analysis of the full CMB spectra should be always preferred, using the position of the CMB peaks and dips provide a simple and consistent method for combining CMB constraints with other datasets.
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