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iPods are for Audiophiles
Mr iPod Luvver writes "Wes Phillips in this month's Stereophile magazine shows the iPod to be an audiophile-quality device. AIFF seems to be the high-resolution ripping option. Says Phillips, 'Dynamics were impressive, imaging was nuanced and detailed, and the frequency extremes sounded extended and natural.'"
sounds great on an iPod!
AIFF seems to be the high-resolution ripping option.
Seems to be? Uhhh. Like WAV, AIFF is uncompressed, so the quality should be identical to the raw data from a CD. AIFF has always been Apple's preferred format, but both are supported. By the way, cdparanoia can rip to AIFF just fine (use the -f flag).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
slow news day?
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
What typical audiophile fluff. Why don't audiophiles ever give any opinion that is actually backed up with data. Oh yes, because if they might find out the oxygen-free 00 gauge speaker wire that they paid $10,000 for doesn't make the music taste anymore like caramel than the normal stuff.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
and in next months stereophile magazine....
Our Computer Hardware: Not a Web-Server-Quality Device
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Apple have obviously selected a good codec, but who designed it? I can't imagine them designing their own codec unless they really needed to.
OOO, I agree! You can hear every hi-frequency overtone as the Emperor's clothes come ripping off!
pictures T_T
Wait just a sec. I don't undertstand.
My opinion differs and I think I'm really quite a great person who knows quite a bit. You see if you just look here at these numbers and ignore those other numbers then you will see that am right.
(The above sums up dozens of posts below it.)
They're part of the same cabal that includes wine experts, except at least the wine people have "I was drunk" as a possible excuse.
I care about the *drunk* not the flavor, which is why I try to buy at least 4-column filtration vodka and mix it with lime-aid. I find that less impurities mean less intense hangovers...
Apple iPod portable music player
By Wes Phillips, October 2003
It was John Atkinson, that legendary ornithologist, who first pointed it out: "Have you noticed how frequently you see women using the iPod?"
I hadn't. I'd been so darn happy striding about the streets of New York listening to Tom Russell and Carla Bley that I hadn't been paying attention. Gimlet-eyed, I now began examining my fellow pedestrians for the telltale flash of the distinctive white-and-chrome player and the giveaway white headphone cable that announced the iPod's earbuds.
What an astoundingly acute observer of the human condition Stereophile's editor proved to be! Of course, there were guys walking around with 'em (many wearing "Think Different!" T-shirts), but the streets were filled with fashionably dressed young women brandishing iPods as though they were this season's trendiest little Manolo Blahnik sling-back.
Holy cow! I'm running with the fashionistas! Can I still be an audiophile, too?
What did you see when you were there?
Apple's third-generation iPods are smaller, sleeker, more capacious than earlier models. The G3 is available with a 10GB, 15GB, or 30GB hard drive. [A 40GB drive is now available.--Ed.] The 30GB version is slightly larger and heavier than the other two, at 4.1" H by 2.4" W by 0.73" D and 6.2oz (compared to 0.62" D and 5.6oz). Our review sample was the 30GB model, which includes several accessories that buyers of the 10GB version have to buy separately: a docking cradle, a wired remote, and a carrying case of elastic and leather. A FireWire connecting cable is standard (it sports an extremely thin "dock connector" on the end that attaches to the iPod, since the iPod itself is too thin to accommodate a standard IEEE1394 plug.) The iPod can connect to a PC through a special 32-pin-to-USB-2.0+FireWire cable. The bifurcated cable has a 32-pin plug on one end, then splits into two cables: one with a USB plug for connection to the computer, the other terminating in a FireWire connector, which plugs into the iPod's power adapter so you can charge the battery.
The iPod is a product of Apple's industrial design department, headed by Jonathan Ives, which means it is very clean and contemporary. The back of the iPod is shiny stainless steel, while the front is bright white plastic. ("White's this year's black," a fashionista of my acquaintance assures me.) The face is dominated by three features: a 1 5/8" by 11/4" (2" diagonal, in TVspeak) backlit LCD display sits above a row of four touch-sensitive control "buttons" (Previous Track, Menu, Play/Pause, Skip Forward), which, in turn, lies above a large touch-sensitive "wheel" that is actually a multifunction control: the outer ring controls volume and navigates through menu choices, while the inner "button" serves as an Enter key.
What's surprising is how flexible and intuitive this seemingly rudimentary control array is in operation. Press Play and the iPod powers on, playing where it left off. Tap Menu and you're given several programming choices. The navigation wheel lets you highlight your choice, and a tap on the enter key takes you to that menu. Use the wheel to choose the option you want, tap enter, and you're there: a new playlist or a new song. All of this can be accomplished one-handed, while running.
The iPod's thin top edge has a 1/8" stereo headphone jack with an adjacent oval slot for anchoring the wired remote (added because users of Gen 1 and 2 iPods complained that the remote disconnected from the chassis too readily), and a sliding panel that activates the hold function for the controls. I found the touch-sensitive control extremely sensitive, so disabling it with the hold function proved a lifesaver.
The thin bottom edge contains the jack for the 32-pin dock connector (interestingly, FireWire uses only six pins--this may represent some sort of future-proofing on Apple's part). In addition to carrying data at 400Mbps, this cable also recharges the iPod's internal lithium-ion battery. Assuming you
Brand X is less expensive, even if it has lower storage, is larger in size and slower connection... but cheaper = better.
Ok, job done, trolls can now take a pass on this one'Codec Y' is not anywhere as good as 'Codec Z' because it sounds worse and the letters used in the name of the codec are displeasing to me.
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
... since the last I heard, Stereophile Magazine guys was still ranting about the "demonic hell" that is CD-quality sound as opposed to LP's "glorious clarity"!
Well, I guess standards slip as time goes on, I know mine have - I'm HERE aren't I?
just kidding.
it comes with a neato car too.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
I find that the midstage harmonics refract badly from the lower soundstage, leading to compaction. A strong application of cerumen to the ear canal is necessary to compensate for these peaked overtones. I would expect Apple to provide a pouch of this material for use with the iPaq, but no such luck - I have had to use the little that I can obtain from friends.
What I want to know is: was the sound airy or spatial? Did it have good low-end punch? Were the transients detailed? Was the midrange sweet or soft? Were the highs clean, or were they just crisp?
http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~m.heijligers/ipo d/measurements.html
as you can see here the ipod takes some serious drops.
other comparrisons here
http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~m.heijligers/ipo d/
I *shudder* at even the mention of the word.
Make a promise to yourself, from this day forward, never utter the word "audiophile" ever again.
Lest you start buying Amber Tweaks:
http://www.1388.com/html/amber_tweak.html
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
Yes, I have to agree with you Michael. AIFF is so much better than WAV. After all, it's less known, and is mentioned in stereophile, so it must be better, right? It's not just ripping, it's high-resolution ripping that counts. With AIFF each of those 16 bits will have so much more resolution that you have to be almost deaf to not be able to hear it...
This is just classic, really:
All iPods ship with a pair of earbud-type headphones with 18mm neodymium-powered drivers. These have surprisingly good sound--at least compared to the phones included with most portable players. A pair of low-impedance Etymotic ER-4Ps ($330) offered much better sound and isolation from environmental noise, but that's a subject for another review.
While reviewing the iPod, he just couldn't resist pointing out that another pair of headphones which costs as much as the iPod itself would be the perfect accessory to complete the gadget.
Money is no object. Then again, this adequately describes most of my fellow Mac afficianados as well....
An audiophile-quality device? Perhaps. But I submit the great wisdom of Penny Arcade.
Actually heard in a high-end(really high end) audio store:
"Yeah, these cables do a great job of keep the high end in phase."
Another high-end store I saw selling markers to black out the edge of your CDs to prevent light loss. The same store had a CD player sitting on an isolation table(unless you've got elephants running through the neighborhood, completely unnecessary).
It is absolutely amazing to sit in one of these stores with any kind of electronics/physics background(father was an EE, it's rubbed off somewhat) and listen to all the bullshit spewing forth...watching the rich idiots sucking it all up...and trying desperately to keep from bursting out laughing.
"Warmth", "Depth", "Presence"...these guys have an adjective list a mile long- and not a single one actually has real-world meaning you can conclusively explain, measure, or demonstrate. They are essentially all snake oil salesmen.
Please help metamoderate.
Please.
... God does that stink. I love America.
"Dynamics were impressive, imaging was nuanced and detailed, and the frequency extremes sounded extended and natural"
Somebody at Apple has been buying somebody at Stereophile some serious dinners on the company plastic
there are also lots of free downloads at my site, earth2willi.com, including losslessly compressed FLAC. Download the FLAC, unzip them to WAV or AIF and load on your iPod! MP3 and Ogg are available too, all totally free of login requirements or service charges, untouched by the RIAA, and complete with print resolution artwork. Stop by the forums while you are there! :)
What are some other options for obtaining FLAC WAV or AIF online?
Most people who claim they hear the difference between a reasonable speaker wire and an unreasonably expensive one, or people that claim they can hear the difference between CD-R brands... or between toslink and coax cables... are too afraid to do a test where they don't KNOW what they're listening to. When people expect their to be a difference, they will swear they hear one. I bet you could hook up two identical, cheap, speaker wires... tell them they cost $5,000 a foot, and switch between them and they will find glowing things to say.
For a more in depth, I already wrote a thing on this at http://cowclops.net/audio/differences.htm
Someone tell him the AIFF is bit for bit identical with the CD, if he ripped it properly. But another reader needed to point out that iTunes has preferences to make it retrieve CDDB entries automatically. Oh well.
something went wrong with that and it crunched all together
i po d/measurements.html
. heijligers/ipo d/
anyhoo
http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~m.heijligers/
here we see the ipod cant perform lows and takes some serious hits
heres some other comparrisons
http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~m
...sound quality-wise AND price-wise.
Everybody knows you need to trace the edges of the LCD with a green marker to get true "audiophile" sound quality. Sheesh.
Read my blog.
'Dynamics were impressive, imaging was nuanced and detailed, and the frequency extremes sounded extended and natural.'
This probably says more about audiophiles than the iPod I'm afraid.
AC.
Speaking as someone who's using his iPod as his hifi and can't wait to get his CD player fixed.
Dynamics were impressive, imaging was nuanced and detailed, and the frequency extremes sounded extended and natural.
For a "consumer level" device, the iPod is certainly adequate. However, I have found that taking a common black marker and darkening the headphone connector improves the "chewiness" of basslines and gives the highs a certain "grapefruit" tone. Combine this with the "smooth leathery" quality that the iPod already imparts to the music, and you've got the beginnings of an entry-level audiophile device. Unfortunately, Apple needs to work on the price. A true audiophile device must cost considerably more than $400, on the order of $1,000 at least.
Otherwise your other audiophile friends will laugh at you. "Ha ha Bob, I bet your little fruit-pod doesn't have an ounce of cobalt in the signal path, or a compass to help you orient the device optimally along the earth's magnetic field. It'll completely butcher your CDs, which are already losing so much detail from the original LP metal masters. You DO rip 32-bit 256KHz AIFF's directly from LP masters using a laser turntable in level 10 clean room facility, right?"
There are no oscilloscope waveforms anywhere in this review. This audiophile remains completely unimpressed, with rectum fully puckered.
there are also lots of free downloads at my site, earth2willi.com, including losslessly compressed FLAC. Download the FLAC, unzip them to WAV or AIF and load on your iPod! MP3 and Ogg are available too, all totally free of login requirements or service charges, untouched by the RIAA, and complete with print resolution artwork. Stop by the forums while you are there! :)
What are some other options for obtaining FLAC WAV or AIF online?
So apple zealots, who has the fastestachine now?
And parent post is clueless as well.
Check your cabling and hardware. The rest of the world can copy 17 megs files on or off Macs in less than 30 seconds.
WAV is a slight modification of AIFF in the header only, done to make people think Microsoft did something significant or else to make PC sound files be different than Macs. Or maybe both. I think this reviewer misses the point, with the levels of compression in normal use (128,160) an iPod can hold 5,000-10,000 songs, that's like 500-1000 albums - that is a significant music library. Of course with AIFF it will only hold about a 10th of that I believe. Don't get me wrong,I love my iPod and am looking forward to the Thursday rumored release of iTunes for Windoze. Then I can give Apple some cash.
There are lies, damn lies, statistics, and audiophiles.
This seemed to jibe with what I found at This Site that compares the ipod's sound quality to other MP3 players. He said he found that the line out was good, but that the headphone seemed to be lacking.
I'll have to listen again, but that would stink because the ipod is almost perfect in other ways. I might still get it even with imperfect sound!
Once I plugged in a pair of Grados, I realized just how good the iPod is.
The headphones that ship with the iPod are pretty good, but once you use a real pair, you'll never take out those earbuds again.
Sound waves should be free!
there have been numerous tests with audiophiles. they couldn't discern a mp3 encoded at 256 from the real source.
Were the electrons in the cables flowing the RIGHT WAY?
Perhaps it needs to be rewritten, tho:
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I have recently upgraded from a Mac 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM to a new G6 quad 4GHz with AGP 16X and PCI-X to help me at my freelance gig where I needed to copy a 17 Meg file from my home network to a desktop folder. On the G6 it took almost 14 days. At home, on my Ti99/4A, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 4 nanoseconds. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, my iPod will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this. My cat has been run over, the dog is pregnant, my toilet is backed up and I am having shooting pains up and down my right arm. None of this happened before I got the G6!
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My Ti99/4a with 16k of ram running an OS I programmed myself from the back pages of old Byte magazines is faster than this G6 quad 4GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
I resent the implication that I use Apples!
Apple did develope this protocol.
They just did before you were born.
And why would they NOT support there own codec.
Uncompressed high quality audio on a portable harddrive native to a system used a lot in the creative/music scene ?? is that really so weird ?
I wonder if Ipod plays the aiff-compressed protocol . I never used this.
retep
Yet another thing for the Macintosh bluebloods to snootily talk about, looking with arched eyebrow at someone's lowly Archos, while wearing their turtlenecks and black berets and munching on Brie and caviar. Fortunately you can just say "iMac" and they become despondent and stumble away.
Christ, use a bit of that atrophied brain of yours and come up with a new troll. You keep using this tired old piece of shit one verbatim over and over. Oh and Windows sucks donkey balls, one day you may gain the capacity to understand that but until then don't forget, inhale, exhale, repeat.
Trix are for kids.
Silly rabbit.
(go see "Kill Bill"!)
Cowboy Neal Option :
Maybe better sound, but it reduces the song capactiy of your iPod about 90%, eh?
Anyway, I can't trust someone who refers to themselves as "gimlet eyed" and agonizes over their identity as an audiophile. To me that situation is just crying out for an intervention. Or a deprogramming. Or a delousing. Or a kick in the butt. Or something.
--- Ban humanity.
Link 1
Link 2
Actually, that's slashdot. It's been coughing up blood all week, Bob.
Your problem is software, not hardware. I don't know what the heck is causing that to happen for you, but it sounds like a bug in Samba or something. OS X 10.3 uses Samba 3, which is supposed to be a lot faster and may resolve that issue for you.
On my gigabit home network, using AFP (Apple's protocol), copying a 17mb file between a dual 2ghz G5 and a 1ghz Powerbook G4 happens so quickly that the first time I tried it I thought something was broken.
You just got it WAY wrong. Stereophile exists to sell music systems. I'm sure JA would quibble with this but, at the end of the day, he'd have to admit this is the primary reason it exists. And many of the people who read that magazine are a persnickity bunch who wouldn't move beyond the 19th century if you shackled'em and threw'em in a donkey cart. Reviews of equipment like this help motivate a voluntary movement on their part.
And at the end of the day it's a review written by a reviewer. Would you go choose to not see a movie based on one bad movie review? Or allow one good review to change your opinion?
That's all it is... an opinion. And magazines like SP don't exist to publish bad ones - it pisses off the advertisers.
Hmm, that's not entirely a fair characterization. The iPod is high quality. There is stuff that's cheaper, but it feels cheap (plasticky) and looks cheap (plasticky). Even today, the iPod is still the smallest, sleekest, and nicest looking MP3 player you can buy. It also has great audio quality, which makes it the complete package. The has great audio quality, but is a lot larger. The new Sonicblue is small (though not smaller in terms of total volume) but looks and feels cheap. Overall, the iPod makes you feel good. Its something you don't get tired of touching and looking at, like an expensive watch.
There are hard-to-measure factors that come into play simply because we are humans, and not completely rational beings. Life isn't just about price/performance ratio.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Two of the old kind, but three of the new slimmer models!
You made a mistake, penny-arcade doesn't have any "great wisdom."
Bullshit! How many times have you posted this? Enough already. Are you the same asshole who won't buy a mac because of the keyboard layout?
--Residential Interior Design
I'm not talking AIFF, I'm talking the codec chip or are you not familiar with the use of the word codec in that context?
Take exactly the same device, put a big heavy-gauge cable on the headphones and multiply the price 5 times.
Idiot.
I Agree that the iPod sounds excellent using AIFF encoded files and using the dock's line-out to drive my home theatre speakers - but using ANY compression codec (including wav & aiff) with headphones can sound terrible.
The EQ sounds like it also has an "Auto distort on bass hits" option - especially if I'm listening at >= 70% volume. Even with the EQ off it will start sounding terrible at 80% of max volume (not that I listen that loud often).
These problems exist on both after-market 'quality' headphones and those included, but are absent when using line out. Anyone else notice this or am I just overly picky.
(Using a 3rd Gen, 30gb iPod)
Hey there skipper, why don't you row that Jealousy boat ashore someplace else?
Please people take this stuff with a large grain of salt. These are the kinds of people who find differences in "spatial nuance" between different brands of $600 RCA cable and buy things like the >a href="http://www.audioadvisor.com/store/productdet ail.asp?sku=VPIBRICK">Magic Brick.
I like how surprised he sounded that he couldn't tell the difference between a CD and a full-bitrate AIFF file. Who'da think it?
You had something badly configured.. for sure.
Ethernet duplex mismatch, perhaps? faulty cables?
a 17 meg file should copy in seconds, not 20 minutes.
Everything you describe sounds like something was misbehaving badly.
As for how people claim the mac is a superior machine for productivity.. perhaps it's because we get more work done with it?
I've used all kinds of computers and operating systems. I'm a long time unix nut, and since it came around, a linux nut also. In fact, up until six months ago, I wouldn't touch a mac. Then my truck got stolen, along with my Toshiba laptop (which ran XP). So.. I went out on a limb and tried a mac. Not only did I pick up a mac, but a low-end 800Mhz ibook. The only thing I added was ram, to bring it up to the limit of 640MB.
Now.. we come to productivity.
installing software is faster and easier. Working with files is faster and easier. Diagnosing problems is faster and easier.
The main thing, though, is I feel like OS X works WITH me, not against me.. it does things that are, to me, very logical and straightforward. I don't spend time getting sidetracked figuring out how to arrange my desktop or system to do a particular task.. it just works.. using the GUI is VERY repetitive. I feel like I've been in the dark until I used this.
As for more stable... I don't see it. The typical time between power on/off on my iBook is, well, I can't guess.. I rarely ever turn it off, except for the odd upgrade. IT suspends immediately upon closing the lid, and resumes immediately when I open it... and it does it cleanly and accurately. The battery lasts 5 hours.. I forgot the power cable at home one morning.. didn't matter, used it all day at work anyway. I was watching a divx last night, and it just suspended, towards the end of hte movie.. then I realized I forgot to plug it in (and it had been low on batteries when I started). I grabbed the adapter, plugged it in, hit shift a couple times to wake it up, and it resumed at the exact spot.
I choose to use a mac because having a work environment that really works with me, not against me, is more beneficial to my productivity than raw processing speed.
The problem you had was related to some kind of network card issue, and has nothing to do with the speed of the computer. I assure you that G5 can move a 17 meg file around a hell of a lot faster than your other computers.
Please find me one place on an iPod or an iPod box where it says "Apple."
It has the stylized Apple logo, of course, but that wasn't covered by the trademark agreement; only the word was.
Apple's lawyers, surprising though it may be to you, are not colossal idiots.
The IFF specs utilized by the Amiga for a range of different fileformats, is the same specs that Apple's AIFF is based on. The common IFF audio files on the Amiga are 8SVX though, not AIFF. The IFF is just a container format like AVI. Contrary to AVI, IFF is a good container format.
Btw, Apple didn't follow the specs very thorougly (they used Apple style strings, instead of normal null terminated strings, for example).
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Suprise: the digital format that was designed to be as close to raw data is the best sounding!
Suprise: Apple makes hardware that works very well and is pretty!
Suprise: The smallest sleekest most expensive gadget was chosen as a favorite!
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
3. Audiophiles are too stupid to realize that there are other products out there that are just as cool but half the price.
Well, I was just about to go buy an iPod. Which portable music player is equal in sound quality, and costs less? (note this is a serious question, not a sarcastic rant)
Comparing an old version of Windows with any current OS doesn't help your argument. Windows for Workgroups is actually DOS with a Window manager. Any modern OS, whether it be Windows XP, OS X, or Linux, is run by a large kernel that supports a wide variety of hardware, and therefore uses a lot more memory. It also runs a number of services that might include a graphical session, networking and other fancy modern things.
I've used both the single-processor G5 and the dual. They're fast. I was actually surprised, since Mac speed hasn't impressed me in recent years and I'm not a 'Mac fanatic.' The G4 fell way behind Intel and AMD offerings, but the G5 is noticeably faster.
When you were copying that file, were you connecting to an SMB share, or using AppleTalk, or what? That 20-minute copy time is weird, and it sounds like a networking issue, not an OS problem. On a 10 megabit network a 17 MB file should copy in under 14 seconds. Even when you take the file protocol into account it shouldn't take over a minute.
They are all INSANE.
How else do you explain all the cables that are "TUNED" for the electrons to flow better one way but not the other?
By Wes Phillips, October 2003
It was John Atkinson, that legendary ornithologist, who first pointed it out: "Have you noticed how frequently you see women using the iPod?"
I hadn't. I'd been so darn happy striding about the streets of New York listening to Tom Russell and Carla Bley that I hadn't been paying attention. Gimlet-eyed, I now began examining my fellow pedestrians for the telltale flash of the distinctive white-and-chrome player and the giveaway white headphone cable that announced the iPod's earbuds.
What an astoundingly acute observer of the human condition Stereophile's editor proved to be! Of course, there were guys walking around with 'em (many wearing "Think Different!" T-shirts), but the streets were filled with fashionably dressed young women brandishing iPods as though they were this season's trendiest little Manolo Blahnik sling-back.
Holy cow! I'm running with the fashionistas! Can I still be an audiophile, too?
What did you see when you were there? Apple's third-generation iPods are smaller, sleeker, more capacious than earlier models. The G3 is available with a 10GB, 15GB, or 30GB hard drive. [A 40GB drive is now available.--Ed.] The 30GB version is slightly larger and heavier than the other two, at 4.1" H by 2.4" W by 0.73" D and 6.2oz (compared to 0.62" D and 5.6oz). Our review sample was the 30GB model, which includes several accessories that buyers of the 10GB version have to buy separately: a docking cradle, a wired remote, and a carrying case of elastic and leather. A FireWire connecting cable is standard (it sports an extremely thin "dock connector" on the end that attaches to the iPod, since the iPod itself is too thin to accommodate a standard IEEE1394 plug.) The iPod can connect to a PC through a special 32-pin-to-USB-2.0+FireWire cable. The bifurcated cable has a 32-pin plug on one end, then splits into two cables: one with a USB plug for connection to the computer, the other terminating in a FireWire connector, which plugs into the iPod's power adapter so you can charge the battery.
The iPod is a product of Apple's industrial design department, headed by Jonathan Ives, which means it is very clean and contemporary. The back of the iPod is shiny stainless steel, while the front is bright white plastic. ("White's this year's black," a fashionista of my acquaintance assures me.) The face is dominated by three features: a 1 5/8" by 11/4" (2" diagonal, in TVspeak) backlit LCD display sits above a row of four touch-sensitive control "buttons" (Previous Track, Menu, Play/Pause, Skip Forward), which, in turn, lies above a large touch-sensitive "wheel" that is actually a multifunction control: the outer ring controls volume and navigates through menu choices, while the inner "button" serves as an Enter key.
What's surprising is how flexible and intuitive this seemingly rudimentary control array is in operation. Press Play and the iPod powers on, playing where it left off. Tap Menu and you're given several programming choices. The navigation wheel lets you highlight your choice, and a tap on the enter key takes you to that menu. Use the wheel to choose the option you want, tap enter, and you're there: a new playlist or a new song. All of this can be accomplished one-handed, while running.
The iPod's thin top edge has a 1/8" stereo headphone jack with an adjacent oval slot for anchoring the wired remote (added because users of Gen 1 and 2 iPods complained that the remote disconnected from the chassis too readily), and a sliding panel that activates the hold function for the controls. I found the touch-sensitive control extremely sensitive, so disabling it with the hold function proved a lifesaver.
The thin bottom edge contains the jack for the 32-pin dock connector (interestingly, FireWire uses only six pins--this may represent some sort of future-proofing on Apple's part). In addition to carrying data at 400Mbps, this cable also recharges the iPod's internal lithium-ion battery. Assuming you turn
When you open the box it says "Designed By Apple in California" or something very similar
One thing any true audiophile should be concerned with is specs. It's not that specs are everything, it's just that you can usually tell shit from gold by weight. (I am not an audiophile - I am a producer/engineer).
:) Consumer stuff..
http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html
Standard 20Hz - 20Khz (no mention of how it was measured). Headphone impedance 32ohms. This thing isn't going to drive any audiophile quality headphones very well.
Where's the distortion specs? Where's the dynamics specs?
It probably sounds decent enough with the right set of headphones, pickings will be slim without an amp here, but it definitely has CONSUMER QUALITY written all over it as far as I can see.
Just like your HK computer speakers and your Bose Home Theater system
I have one; they are good players with a good user interface, but the battery life is really shitty. If you just charge them up and play they're okay, but due to their stupid "suspend-instead-of-power-off" mode they're no use for taking on holiday as they go flat in a few days even in standby. Come on Apple, was a "power off" button really too much to hope for?
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
From the: I-Don't-Give-A-Shit-Dept... hmmm yeah... sounded funny when i started reading through the comments, but now i feel like a troll ;(
What is slashdot?
While I agree that there are some fringe lunatics in the audiophile camp, I think the logical/mathematicals here on /. are being unfair.
Audio quality is something he can't measure yet. The process of how the human ear interprets sound is not yet understood well enough for us to make quantitative measurements of audio quality. I remember reading an interview with an important technical guy at EMU. He said that when Creative bought them, he was shocked to see that Creative engineers were happily designing circuits that measured well, but sounded terrible.
In the abscence of quantitative measurements, audio people have built up a jargon to describe the subjective elements of audio. There are clearly some subjective elements. For example, I ripped some Sheryl Crow CDs to 128kbps MP3. When I played them over my speakers (Klipsch 4.1, nowhere near audiophile quality) they sounded flat, as if I was listening to them through some thick fabric. I don't know what else to call it, but its clearly there, and so using one random jargon term is as good as another.
People here are bringing up wine tasters, and I think that serves as a perfect example. The wine tasters have their own jargon, but all the terms have clearly defined meanings. Just because you don't know the meanings doesn't mean that the jargon is stupid. People complain that we nerds talk about CPUs and GPUs and FSBs instead of using "plain language." Now, would you rather call the thing a GPU or a "drawing thingie?" Would any other computer person have the foggiest idea what the hell you were talking about if you said that you were trying to find the API to send vertex-shaders (gotta come up with a plain-language term for those too!) to the "drawing thingie?" A standardized jargon is important to any field. It might sound stupid to people outside that field, but I think that computer people should know better than most that the jargon really is necessary.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It is not the smallest -- there are flash based players that are smaller. There are some very nice harddisk based ones (new Rios) that are comparable (I don't have the specs in front of me). Different things appeal to different people.
"Over a decade ago, Apple signed an agreement with Apple Corps, a business controlled by the Beatles and their heirs, which specified the rights each company would have to use the Apple trademark. Unfortunately, Apple and Apple Corps now have differing interpretations of this agreement and will need to ask a court to resolve this dispute," the statement said."
/ 99 6751p-6999290c.html
http://newsobserver.com/24hour/technology/story
Perhaps the computer company would feel differently if the record compny were selling 1394 complient devices and calling them "Firewire".
I guess you perspective gets a little bent (or weans in validity) if your selling a product whose success will come from the theft of someone else's IP. Yup, pretty clever lawyers indeed.
Making the iPod sound this good was overkill considering what 99.9% of people use it for-- listening to some 128kb mp3 downloaded off of Kazaa. Consumers who want an iPod are forced to slap down more money for features that they'll never need. Apple, keep the style, loose the technology and high price.
The Creative Jukebox Zen is about the same size and about $200 less depending on where you buy it.
-]Phreak Out[-
Of course they are, silly! I have over 1300 audio files on mine, mostly in mp3 format. Am I missing something here?
Oh, audiophiles... my bad. those are what the RIAA doesn't hate. Hmm.. What if we spelled MP3 differently? Empy Thrii? "I am an audiophile of discerning tastes and I encode my empy-thrii's at 256mega-giga-bps!"
-Major Kusanagi, Section 9
SIGFEH
"2. The iPod costs more than its weight in gold" Price of gold: $340 per oz. Weight of 40GB iPod: 6.2 oz. Predicted cost of 40GB iPod: $2,100 Actual cost of 40GB iPod: $500 I know you actually meant to say that they were really expensive. I was just curious how much it would cost. I wonder how many people would actually consider an iPod to be worth its weight in gold?
It was a slashdotting joke my man... not a Mac joke.
"mac joke" is redundant! (ducking)
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
ive seen them positively review products that drop frequencies above 16khz. still claiming they were great devices. are those also for audiophiles?
Voice of Fire is acrylic on canvas. It is a large, tall painting: 5.4 metres (almost 18 feet) high by 2.4 metres (or eight feet) wide. On it are painted three vertical -- "stripes" is the word favoured by the cartoonists, who had some fun contrasting it with a supposed "polka-dot" school, but I think that anyone who takes the trouble to engage with the painting will come to see them rather as "columns" -- of colour. The columns on either side are deep blue with a purplish cast (a combination of prussian blue and ultramarine). The central column is a very warm -- "fiery" I think must be the word -- cadmium red, approaching orange. The colour contrast is intense. The lines are rigidly straight, although the colours bleed slightly into one another. The texture is flat, but the white undercoat gives the colours intense luminosity. The painting envelopes you as you approach it. The price, $1.76 million.
Here's what you get when you let snootiness rule. $1.76 million spent on this!
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I suspect he must be a troll too.
Don't feel the trolls, eh?
Sounds like a bunch of ducks quacking to me...
and this is considered redundant why?
It seems that, along with MS and the RIAA, audiophiles are a popular target of bashing on /.
I do agree that all the sh*t about oxygen free cables and motion dampeners and such is just that, but even so there is some truth to Hi-Fi. My uncle's an audiophile, but he's no fool and his system is good enough to make a grown man weep. It's not that there's so little distortion (in fact there's quite a bit from the tube amp, and I'm pretty sure your mind expects and wants a certain ammount of distortion), it's that the music sounds live - you can hear every little detail of what's on the cd/reel/record. He doesn't use oxygen-free cables or any other special gizmo, but he does use the highest quality (and thus expensive) electronics he can find, and it's the difference between a fuzzy picture and one that's perfectly in focus.
Jw
The headline seems to imply that AAC is inherently better for sound reproduction; however, the article specifically says 128kb AAC's are not meant for critical listening. Here's the relevant quote:
"Things are somewhat better at 128kbps in both MP3 and AAC, but neither cuts the mustard for critical listening at home."
As to the comparison between AAC and MP3:
"MP3 robbed Steve Swallow's pulsing bass lines of dynamics and punch [...]. AAC fared slightly better, offering better bass response (although it was still pretty lightweight compared to the original CD) "
So now you understand why 128kb iTunes costs less than the CD. They don't sound as good as the CD. Case closed.
There you have it. So please, no more chirping on about how 128kb AAC's are indistinguishable from
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
RTFM
press and hold the play button, and the power goes off
i use mine for commuting, and charge it over the weekend,
no problem, sits in the car for 5 days never seems to go below 1/3 charge. 30 minute commute each way.
Depth and presence actually have real definitions in the world of recording and mixing. Presence is a boost in equalization around 10k (works well for vocals, most guitar amps also have a presence control). Depth (usually) refers to the size of the stereo sound stage, and depends upon the differences between the left and right channel. Some devices meant for headphone use will process the sound to try make it sound like it's coming from a forward sound stage, rather than in between your ears. I don't know if an iPod has any feature like this. Although hard to quantify, presence and depth can definitely be explained and observed.
Warmth, however, doesn't have a real hard definition, although people tend to agree when something sounds warm or cold.
However, these guys were probably just using words they overheard their musician friends using. For digital media, I've found that the playback hardware and cables make no difference I can hear. And except for the cheapest amps (which usually introduce a lot phase distortion, not harmonic distortion), the amp doesn't make a significant difference either. Everyone has gotten pretty good at making (cheap) circuits that don't disturb the audio signal too much. But the speakers can make a tremendous difference! These are still electromechanical devices that require good design, materials, and workmanship to sound good. These guys were probably really hearing their $300 dollar headphones instead of the iPod.
"Many audiophiles remember VPI's first Magic Brick isolation device and the significant improvement it made to their systems. VPI now reintroduces the Magic Brick, but it's new and improved.
The new real Mahogany wood casing houses a proprietary mass-loaded compound designed to quash chassis vibrations and soak up harmful RF and EMI noise. You'll notice improved transient response and imaging. The effects are quite amazing! Simply place The New Magic Brick on top of your component and you'll immediately hear the sonic improvements. Works great on video gear too.
"
I, for one, welcome our new impressive, nuanced, detailed, extended, natural, fluffy-caramelled, audiophile-quality Overlords with gusto and verve.
Sorry, I'm too tired to resist... *sigh* ... need to go home.
Do you really not know what those words mean, or is this a new brand of "superiority-through-illiteracy" troll?
None of the article's descriptions is any less meaningful than your own description of those descriptions as "hilarious," as hilarity, too, is not a mathematically describable objective referent.
Can't you turn it off - all the way off - by holding down the Play/Pause key for a bit? My original gen iPod turns off that way.
O'Reilly has battery-saving tips:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/lpt/a/4056
Also read somewhere that the alarm function uses power even when off...
What is on the CD is actually PCM, or Pulse Code Modulation. It's close to AIFF, but as someone else pointed out, PCM doesn't have all the timecode stuff that AIFF does.
So stick that in yer iPod and listen to it!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I don't know whether the online version includes these measurements. In general, the online version has the measurement pages at the end of the click-throughs. I can't check it out, since stereophile seems to have gotten spanked :)
I'm reading this using Mozilla on QNX Neutrino 6.21, with a microkernel about 60K in size. All the drivers are in user space, and only the ones being used are running. You don't have to have bloat.
Put a staple in it!
is that often the salespeople are totally convinced by the electronic's companies propaganda. So if you go to a local store (and sometimes chain stores too) the people there are often being honest and sincere- they're just passing on the brainwashing they received themselves. Some /.er asked for stats to backup claims- please no! There are many, many bogus metrics advertised- and many counter claims about "true" metrics. Its not unlike UFOs and claims that faked reports are part of the conspiracy- its a neverending cycle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
Seriously, and with no intent to troll, does anyone know what the audiophile community means by 'image outlines'? I hear this term thrown around a lot by audiophiles, and I'm baffled at what is actually means.
Stupid like a fox!
I once read an Audiophile review of mini disc media That's right, media. All of the high-falootin' language being applied to the improved sound coming from digital files being played back from one type of media versus another type of media, from the same player, recorded from same digital source.
It's kind of like an art snob talking about the differences in the colours of identical image files burned onto different CDs, or emailed via different email clients.
Mind you, we used to say it was impossible to get a computer virus by looking at a piece of email...
This article was hilarious. (Yes, I actually read it.)
Really interesting that uncompressed audio sounds as good as the original cd to the reviewer's ears. True audiophiles would comment on the quality of the iPod's D-A converters, though.
All in all, the article was a nice package of hype, but the guy had no clue. I mean praising the quality of the headphones that come with it?
No, it's true... for certain iPods. I've had 2 replacements for my 20 gig iPod (weird issues), and the current one gets terrible battery life compared to the others.
The claim is that the 128kb iTunes file is from MASTER quality!
What you *want* to compare is a Master -> 128kb AAC to a Master -> CD; what you *are* comparing is a Master -> CD -> 128kb AAC, and claiming the Master -> 128kb AAC don't sound as good as the CD.
You have no grounds for claiming that; the article itself doesn't talk about the iTunes Music Store; you bring that into the discussion without admitting that you are comparing one generation of loss (Master -> AAC) with two (Master -> CD -> AAC)!
GPL Deconstructed
Guys, when you do not understand something it doesn't mean it's not true. It's pathetic to look at all of you criticizing someone on his knowledge while you have none of it on the subject!
I'll address some of the complaints found in this thread:
-Yes most audiophile are actually rich people who will buy anything as long as it's buzzword-compliant, however the terminology of the article is actually used in the right way and its comment are rather descriptive for audio professionnals. It's now been 6 years that I work in studios (post-production mainly and some music), I am also a consultant for studios and musician, I have been an AV tech for corporate events for the last 3 years (audio, video and data).
-Like in any field, audio pros have their tech-speech, terminology and jargon. It is just faster to tell your colleague that the sound is "boomy" than to tell him that "there is a bump around 250Hz that seems to reach the entire lower end making the bass hard to define", if you say boomy to a soundman he will know what it means and act accordingly. Most words used by soundman to deffine various audio caractheristic are universal, "boomy", "airy" and "crisp" all means the same thing around the world to audio pros, there are even reference books you can use to identify the exact meaning of those words (in rellation with frequency, dymamic, image, artefacts, etc.).
here we go!
-Dynamics: every audio material has both low amplitude passages and high amplitude (volume) passages, the difference between those passages is called the dynamic range of the material (the gear it plays on probably has a diffrent dynamic range itself since it needs to reproduce different material each having a diffrent dynamic range). when someone says the dynamics were good it means the material original dynamics are left untouched, no compressor or expander found at the output.
-Cables: to hear the difference between various wire gauge and composition you need an appropriate monitoring system (klipsh pro-crap and altec lansass aren't good monitoring systems). If, in a stereo setup your wires have different impedance high-ends will be cancelled because different impedances will create different delays in the audio stream therefore muting some high frequencies at the speakers combined output. You won't hear that on your PC speakers because their very conception induce phase cancellation, whereas on decent speakers adequately placed you will definitely hear it. Wires makes a big difference when the rest of your system is decent. Do you need that difference? no, you don't, you are used to hear stuff unpolished and its a good thing. However the soundman needs to hear this to be able to correct any mistakes found in this range which could be obvious on some systems, if the frequencies are cancelled he won't perceive them and will therefore not perceive the mistake. the audiophile will also want this.
-Presence: the human hearing is inherently flawed, given that all frequencies are generated at the same amplitude your hear will hear some of them at higher amplitude and some of them at lower amplitude. The human voice range is usually perceived at a huge 3dB difference than the rest of the audible frequencies, the human voice is usually found between 900Hz and 4.5KHz centered at 1.2KHz or 2.4KHz depending on your gender and physical caractheristics. The frequency range between 1.2KHz and 3.2KHz is called the presence range because when you lower this frequency range you will hear the voice of a person like if that person is far away or in a weird environement, you will also have problems focusing on what is said, if you crank that range up the person will sound pretty close (even with some reverb...) and intelligible.
-Airy: a bump in amplitude over 12.5KHz making the material sound like it's diffused, contain a lot of space in between individual sounds contained in the material. Space??? yes space, see there is a thing called stereo image (or surround image depending on the material) in audio,
Objective, empirically accessible referents.
Do you doubt what I mean by "DDR memory bus"? Well come down to the lab and we can do some disassembly on the part and point out to you just what it is. We can also explain to you precisely what its role is.
Jargon in the audiophile world is similar to a gam3r_d00d saying, "the quad-pumped deep pipeline increases the triangle fillrate on its etched boolean architecture," or some other incomprehensible hooey.
You see, like the words employed by the audiophile, this phrase refers to no objective property, relation, or behavior of the computer component. Instead, if it means or expresses anything, it probably is the equivalent of saying "Hurrah for the ATI 9500!," or whatever the component in question is.
When the audiophile says, "euphonic back-front transcience," he is talking out of his ass. His expression is the equivalent of, "I am simply a higher lifeform than you, miscreant".
To which I reply, "You sir, are the damnedest, most pretentsious, little prick I have ever had the displeasure of meeting. Please crawl back into whatever hole you were shit out of, and die."
audiophiles are all headcases
love is just extroverted narcissism
Perhaps the computer company would feel differently if the record compny were selling 1394 complient devices and calling them "Firewire".
Over a year ago, Apple donated their FireWire trademark--both the name and the logo. Apple still owns it, but anybody who releases a IEEE1394-compliant product can use it without royalty, or even notice.
Well, the flash based players aren't really in the same catagory. I was really talking about other MP3 jukeboxes, like the Nomad Zen. Also, the Rio is an inch shorter than the iPod, but 0.6 inches wider and 0.3 inches thicker. Unless you wear cargo pants, the rectangular shape of the iPod is much easier on your pockets than the square shape of the Rio. Besides, the iPod is still smaller overall, at 6.1 cubic inches vs 7.3 cubic inches for the Rio.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
If you can't see it, it doesn't mean it's not there.
If you can't hear it, it doesn't mean it's inaudible (to those with better hearing, taste, sensibility, whatever).
-=-
On a less sensational note, objective measurements of stereo equipment sounds like a great idea, until you put it into practice with severe disappointment. Quantifications of music provide some insight, but overall are gross oversimplifications of what sounds good... and what doesn't (even though it may measure well in all the obvious and usual ways).
Caveat emptor.
You could do quantitative measurements for movie reviews, but that's not going to yield very informative results. For musical equipment, I'd rather have a trusted pair of ears do the listening and let me know what they hear (like a movie reviewer).
It's natural not to like all movie reviewers (difference in taste) nor all music equipment reviewers (difference(s) in hearing acuity and taste). Find the one(s) you like, and use their advice as a guide (still use your own judgment/ear/hearing to draw your own final conclusions).
Human hearing is highly variable. Linear measurements don't tell nearly the whole story. A good reviewer is currently the best system for reviewing equipment, and Stereophile is professional enough to supplement the review with measurements.
Listen tunefully!
Apple iPod portable music player
By Wes Phillips, October 2003
It was John Atkinson, that legendary ornithologist, who first pointed it out: "Have you noticed how frequently you see women using the iPod?"
I hadn't. I'd been so darn happy striding about the streets of New York listening to Tom Russell and Carla Bley that I hadn't been paying attention. Gimlet-eyed, I now began examining my fellow pedestrians for the telltale flash of the distinctive white-and-chrome player and the giveaway white headphone cable that announced the iPod's earbuds.
What an astoundingly acute observer of the human condition Stereophile's editor proved to be! Of course, there were guys walking around with 'em (many wearing "Think Different!" T-shirts), but the streets were filled with fashionably dressed young women brandishing iPods as though they were this season's trendiest little Manolo Blahnik sling-back.
Holy cow! I'm running with the fashionistas! Can I still be an audiophile, too?
What did you see when you were there?
Apple's third-generation iPods are smaller, sleeker, more capacious than earlier models. The G3 is available with a 10GB, 15GB, or 30GB hard drive. [A 40GB drive is now available. -Ed.] The 30GB version is slightly larger and heavier than the other two, at 4.1" H by 2.4" W by 0.73" D and 6.2oz (compared to 0.62" D and 5.6oz). Our review sample was the 30GB model, which includes several accessories that buyers of the 10GB version have to buy separately: a docking cradle, a wired remote, and a carrying case of elastic and leather. A FireWire connecting cable is standard (it sports an extremely thin "dock connector" on the end that attaches to the iPod, since the iPod itself is too thin to accommodate a standard IEEE1394 plug.) The iPod can connect to a PC through a special 32-pin-to-USB-2.0+FireWire cable. The bifurcated cable has a 32-pin plug on one end, then splits into two cables: one with a USB plug for connection to the computer, the other terminating in a FireWire connector, which plugs into the iPod's power adapter so you can charge the battery.
The iPod is a product of Apple's industrial design department, headed by Jonathan Ives, which means it is very clean and contemporary. The back of the iPod is shiny stainless steel, while the front is bright white plastic. ("White's this year's black," a fashionista of my acquaintance assures me.) The face is dominated by three features: a 1 5/8" by 11/4" (2" diagonal, in TVspeak) backlit LCD display sits above a row of four touch-sensitive control "buttons" (Previous Track, Menu, Play/Pause, Skip Forward), which, in turn, lies above a large touch-sensitive "wheel" that is actually a multifunction control: the outer ring controls volume and navigates through menu choices, while the inner "button" serves as an Enter key.
What's surprising is how flexible and intuitive this seemingly rudimentary control array is in operation. Press Play and the iPod powers on, playing where it left off. Tap Menu and you're given several programming choices. The navigation wheel lets you highlight your choice, and a tap on the enter key takes you to that menu. Use the wheel to choose the option you want, tap enter, and you're there: a new playlist or a new song. All of this can be accomplished one-handed, while running.
The iPod's thin top edge has a 1/8" stereo headphone jack with an adjacent oval slot for anchoring the wired remote (added because users of Gen 1 and 2 iPods complained that the remote disconnected from the chassis too readily), and a sliding panel that activates the hold function for the controls. I found the touch-sensitive control extremely sensitive, so disabling it with the hold function proved a lifesaver.
The thin bottom edge contains the jack for the 32-pin dock connector (interestingly, FireWire uses only six pins- this may represent some sort of future-proofing on Apple's part). In addition to carrying data at 400Mbps, this cable also recharges the iPod's internal lithium-ion ba
A $25 discman that holds 10 gigs of music and can double as a hard drive, in half the space of a cd player, then I'll trade in my iPod.
Plus, I bought mine on clearance, so I only paid $200.
Sure, if you very rarely listen to music, a discman is fine, but if you listen to a lot, or want to be able to take your collection around, the iPod rocks.
I have blog like everyone else
It's battery powered, so you've a low-impedance power supply totally isolated from any sort of mains bourne interference. All the audio data coming from the hard drive will be accurately re-clocked before being sent to the DAC, which incidentally includes s 60mW headphone/cable driver... nice low impedance output. I would like to see some jitter spectra and figures to see how accurate that re-clocking is, mind...
As digital audio equipment goes, it could be engineered a whole lot worse, and my own ears tell me that an iPod in tandem with Sony MDR-EX70 in-ear headphones sounds sublime. These headphones are noise-isolating, superb sounding, and extremely good value for money.
Matt...
Save the Bottom Line
Actually, if you had ever taken a look inside the magazine you're critisizing, you have noticed that Stereophile provides EXTENSIVE quantative data for every product that it reviews. For the iPod you can see frequency response, jitter, intermodulation distortion, harmonic distortion, channel seperation, and many other measurments. And lots and lots of graphs. So next time, make the effort to understand what you're talking about before you make a fool of yourself.
As Winston Churchill said, "This is something up with which I shall not put!" I don't remember the context exactly, but I think was when he was being called to task by a similarly stuffy school teacher.
Attending many live concerts from artists such as AC/DC, the Boston Pops, Lilith Fair and many others ... it becomes immediately clear that there are acoustic differences between music types and the venue. Our desire to recreate "the experience." simply can not happen. We can however "do the best we can" by using low distortion electronics, powerful (zero crossing) amplifiers and speakers that deliver sufficient sound pressure levels and good source material.
All of these elements are getting better (the CD is better than Vinyl using a Shure V15 type 3 cart) but the fact remains that it is a panacea and a curse to be an audiophile ... it can never be achieved.
Not quite related, but can someone PLEASE explain what those $5,000 to $10,000 wires are supposed to do?
I have seen really expensive setups, and I beleive the amps are truely are more linear and the systems make less distortion than my POS sony receiver that randomly crashes and has to be rebooted, or my sony dvd player that I had to modify with silver paste, aluminum foil and pliers to stop it from over heating.
But wires???
Wires are usually considered passive elements, and therefore can only affect volume.
But, having taken a few transmition and power classes in my EE career, I know that all wire have capacitance and inductance. But hardly any at all. And certain configurations of wires can reduce it to theoretically zero - for instance, coaxial or parallel wires. (Twisted pairs are basically parallel, btw.)
So, is there any truth to the $10,000 wire claims, or is it all crap? Yes, yes, I am positive they are a little better, but enough to easily measure? Enough to hear? Links would be wonderful...
at the Itunes music store for Windows! Apple's invited the press to a "Music Event" and it's widely believed the ITMS for Windows will launch then. Less sure is whether or not a new version of Itunes will arrive.
I have an Elacin pair which use the Etymotic drivers, but are made of latex and moulded to my ear canals; they act like earplugs, cutting off all external noise to an amazing degree, and are extremely comfortable. (I sometimes use them as plain earplugs, and have slept in them.) They sound amazing, and the silence they create outside that is extremely relaxing. For the use I've had out of them, I consider them well worth the 200 I spent. (Which you'd find even more surprising if you saw the cheapness of all my other sound gear!)
If that's too much, Slicsound make some latex mouldings that slip over your existing earbuds and try to give the same sort of isolation. I doubt they're anywhere near as comfortable or as quiet, but they're dirt cheap and I'd recommend trying them.
In short: what's the point of spending all that money on an iPod if you can't really hear it? If you have a nice quiet listening environment, then fine, but if like me you listen in noisy places like public transport, with ordinary phones you might just as well rip everything at 32 kbps and get a cheaper player. For me, I value my hearing and my music, and I'm as pleased with my expensive phones as I am with my iPod.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
What they gain by building things (such as the IPod) with such high quality is that they have a reputation of producing quality products. When people argue against apple, it is usually phrased: "It may be nice, but..".
What this passes on to the consumer is a feeling that Apple won't pass shit on them. You can buy basically any apple product and be assured that it will work well and be sturdy. This is worth the extra dollars. (especially things such as that an IPod can be dropped and it won't break)
"Audiophiles aren't into listening to music, playing it, dancing to it, or any of the things you are supposed to do with it - although oddly enough they also aren't into objective reality, hard facts, critical reasoning, or any of the left brained activities that one would suspect people who can't dance would be interested in." I don't know who wrote this and where it comes from, but to me it's the best quote I have ever read.
The numbers vs. perception issue has been driving the 'audiophile' press and engineers batty since the first triode was born. It has always been recognized that differences in how something sounds can't always be reconciled on the bench with numbers and test gear. Slew (intermod) distortion wasn't recognized till the 50's. I wonder how many more items we haven't discovered yet.
/. say. A trumpet *will* go clear past 50 khz on the harmonics, a cymbal crash will clear 100k.
;o)
Audio is *NOT* limited to 22.5 khz like some wags right here on
Our measly, pathetic hearing organs cannot 'hear' this, but your body acts as a huge sound collector -- you *feel* it. If it isn't there, or worse, if it is there but distorted, funny things happen.
A well setup system will drop you in the recording room, or whatever the recording engineer created as one. Live recordings, when well done, can suck you right into a smoky bar.
A great stereo goes beyond 'clear', etc. It will give the illusion of not only soundstage width, but depth as well. With two speakers it does what it takes the muggles 5.1 surround to accomplish.
Those that pooh-pooh the audio geeks don't realize numbers don't tell the whole story. They don't even tell part of the story.
Go hear a pipe organ in a top-drawer, 100,000 dollar system. Pretty nice, I bet..
Now go hear the same organ in its natural environ. The bass will grab your chestbone and shake vigorously. Your head will tingle from all the energy past 20khz. Quite wonderful, sound is. Too bad our ears are so crappy. Moral of this one? Even the 100,000 dollar stereo falls way short of the Real Thing.
If you're happy with the Sornys, Magnetboxes and Farnasonics, fine. If not, may I suggest a trip down the AudioAsylum and get educamated. Those with basic soldering skilz and a healthy respect for triple-digit DC voltages will find that with a grand or three you can cobble together a system which will put a dent on a 10,000 audiophool-approved store-bought solution
And yes, 44 khz PCM *is* the devil incarnate. DSD and good ole analog tape are better. Really.
Some other fun thermionic links:
Ominous Valve (Funny!)
Why Hot Glass Rulez (Geeky!)
I've been down the road before. I did the hi-power solid-state (Squalid-state) with cone n' domes, I've done mass-market (Technics), I've done hot glass with horns. Hot glass (tubes, silly) and horn speakers is where its at for me. Makes brass, voices and cymbals just yummy. You can *hear* the rosin on a cello's bow. You can hear Tony Iommi's fingers scrape the strings. You can *hear* that little "click" some singers make when they part their lips.
There *is* a difference.. and as pointed out here, there's also a lot of snake oil.
Experiment. Learn. Build some shit. That way the snake-oil salesmen won't snag you.
It's fun.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
This is what happens when you let automated spell checkers do all the work.
iPods are not for "Audiophiles"
iPods are for Audio Files
Jeez, at least proofread your posts before submitting them!
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
I remember this from the early days of CD: paint the outside edge of your CD with a green (or black) market, and your CD was supposed to sound better.
I tried this on a spice girls CD, and it suddenly sounded 100% better!
but the reason they don't back things up with numbers is that in audio, numbers lie. A lot.
I trust cold, hard numbers - carefully applied - much less than subjective and unreliable human hearing.
A 5W tube system may be louder than a 50W transistor system.
Sure, if the 5W tube system is better impedance matched and into a more efficient corner-loaded infinite baffle speaker.
Consider also that perception of audio intensity is logarithmic. To double the volume requires 4x the power - and that's at the cones of the speakers! 50W will not actually sound that much louder than 5W, even with all other things being the same.
A speaker with .002% signal distortion might easily introduce its own distortion due to cheap magnets or poorly engineered cones and not include that, even though the stat says "Total Harmonic Distortion."
If the speaker's distortion figure doesn't include non-linearities caused by the magnets, cones, surrounds or other parts of the unit, I would suggest that this is something you should take up with the Federal Trade Commission.
Even a stat like "Frequency response: 20 Hz - 22 kHz" is useless if the amplification device is not perfectly linear, and no device is.
This is why reputable audio equipment will include a +/-xdB figure in the frequency response claim.
Likewise, most professional audio amplifiers (ie. Crown, QSC, EV, etc.) will cite THD ratings along with the wattage, as in "750W RMS into 8 ohms with 0.2% THD".
Thus, the auditioning of gear on a "well trained ear" is essential to any audio review.
The auditioning of gear is only to check for correct connection, elimination of factory duds, and sheer enjoyment of the music for which you purchased the system.
And this quote is not even that strange; in fact it's just using different language to explain what we want to hear. Dynamics were impressive means that there was a big difference between loud and soft sounds, usually a sign that the device is delivering sound as accurately as possible.
The technical term is called "dynamic range", and it's mathematically described as the difference between the amplifier's noise floor and maximum wattage rating.
imaging was nuanced and detailed, "imaging" is the combination of stereo seperation combined with balanced delivery of all types of sound (eg, bass doesn't linger and treble doesn't disappear),
Stereo separation is measured in dB attenuation, typically by driving one channel with a 1V p~p 1kHz sinewave and measuring the "leaked" signal from the other channel.
Bass doesn't linger if the amplifier has good frequency response, since bass is a low frequency component and requires much less amplifier bandwidth than the 20kHz ratings of most amplifiers.
Treble doesn't disappear if the amplifier is capable of performing +/- x dB from 20Hz to 20kHz, ie. x is some acceptable number (generally under 1dB). In other words, if the amplifier has sufficient frequency response.
and detailed imaging means you can hear sounds move from left to center to right accurately. Nuanced imaging means there isn't a sudden skip as a sound movees from left to right, or from one note to another.
Which means, in other words, that both amplifier channels are well separated and have the same performance characteristics (measurable by science, you know, science, that evil black mathy-type stuff that got man to the moon and gets people heart transplants).
frequency extremes sounded extended and natural means that low bass and high treble signals are transmitted and not cut off because "you won't hear it any way," and that it also isn't needlessly boosted.
Again, see the definition of the term "frequency response". I believe the *numbers* will allay all your fears.
In short, this unit is going to deliver a clean signal to your headphones or receiver, and that's exactly what you want from an audio device.
In other words, for playback to speakers (as oppos
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I think you should learn to shop around more. While the interface on the iPod felt cheap and insignificant to me the solid metal feel of my Nomad Jukebox Zen NX has a much more significant quality. It is only slightly cheaper per GB of storage but I don't mind spending for a quality product, especially when I don't have to worry about that plastic face.
Fnord.sig
I've got THOUSANDS of songs. . . .up my butt!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
What an astoundingly acute observer of the human condition Stereophile's editor proved to be! Of course, there were guys walking around with 'em (many wearing "Think Different!" T-shirts), but the streets were filled with fashionably dressed young women brandishing iPods as though they were this season's trendiest little Manolo Blahnik sling-back.
Chicks dig iPods! This is good news for slashdotters and audiophiles alike (as, in a previously referenced article most audiophiles are men.
Ah but slashdot missed the chance to point this out, and stereophile recoiled from the idea they might be playing with the same toys as the girls. What horrors! Too bad they did not think they could play with the same toys with the girls, or wonder of wonders, talk with them! That would be horrid!
Yes, the ones and zeros definitely sound better when travelling through this cable that costs 50 extra... ;P
Lots.
Lots of petrified grits
Sound without perception is just waves in the air. If a person drops $10K on speaker wires, the music will very likely sound better to him, even if there is no measurable difference in the signal reaching the speakers. Just because it's called the placebo effect doesn't mean that the results, which is the betterment of perceived sound waves, aren't real.
If I have a headache, and someone sells me a sugar pill but I believe it is a powerful pain reliever, my headache is more likely to go away and I will be pleased as a result. Similarly, if someone sells me $10K speaker wires and I believe they have a powerful effect on my stereo system, I am likely to perceive the effect and may even think the improvement is worth $10K. The trick is making me believe it, and that is where all the "oxygen free" and other techy sounding things come into play.
At least, this is what I like to think is happening. It is the only explanation I can come up with for this. If spending $300 on a box with a single LED allows a person to more fully enjoy his sound system, is there anything wrong with selling it to him? If you hear the difference it may be worth it to you.
I've noticed that Audiophiles don't like it when I call them ignorant saps however.
I'll back up the other responders and say that the Etymotic canalphones are absolutely unbelievable and well worth the $300. More isolation than any other headphone available, with sound as good as the best dynamic headphones, AND they coil up and fit in your breast pocket.
For portable use or stationary use in a noisy environment, nothing else even comes close.
burris
Oh I shopped around plenty. The iPod hardly feels cheap --- its heafty without being heavy, and the materials feel high quality. Overall the device feels very sturdy (the new ones, anyway, where the only external moving part is the hold switch), while some of the controls on the Zen feel a little cheap. Of course, the Zen looks and feels very nice as well, but in the end I preferred the iPod because of the unique design (stainless steel + lucite, while delicate, is much more striking to me than brushed aluminum), the much more pocketable size, and the fact that the firewire Zen (my Dell comes with Firewire but no USB 2.0, go figure) wasn't appreciably cheaper than the iPod.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
how macish to associate mac with stereophile...
sir, you are an idiot.
A Mac running WebStar was hacked during the "hack-a-Mac" contest some years ago. The hack was acknowledged and the $10,000 prize was awarded. The hack ocurred due to an error with BlueWorld's Lasso, and how it served files that were not meant to be served - BlueWorld put their hands up and they, rather than the original sponsor, actually paid out the prize.
If memory serves correctly the server was hacked again sortly afterwards, but the method couldn't be verified.
There have been other WebStar security issues and there's currently a thread in the WebStar mail list about another suspected security breach.
Basically don't be so complacent or so arrogant.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
The iPod is for audiophiles, and, really all Apple products are for those who are discerning in their choice of technology. When only the best will do, Apple is your only choice, really. Sure, you can be a loser and buy a pc, spend a week installing Linux or Windows and still not get any work done, but why would you want to be one of "Them" when you can be hip, cool and one of US? Think different, think better, think Apple. Yeah baby.
I remember this from the early days of CD: paint the outside edge of your CD with a green (or black) market, and your CD was supposed to sound better.
The only thing applying black marker to the outside of a CD does is block the CD player from reading that part of the CD. This incidentally disables some forms of copy restriction such as Sony's Key2Audio. It has been joked that Sony Music considered having black permanent markers banned in the U.S. under the DMCA as a circumvention device.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What, are the bits more pristine than when using a conventional cable?
Possibly. Not all modulation schemes are the same, and some cables seem to reject ambient electromagnetic noise better than others, which might as well be antennas.
Are the 1s and 0s more like 0.999 and 0.001 than 0.998 and 0.002 with cheap cables?
Yes. Signals sent at very high data rates typically use some sort of complicated modulation that's sensitive to frequency response, phase response, linearity, or the like. I'm guessing that a more expensive cable will generally have its capacitance and its inductance balanced out, its wires will be of thick enough gauge that using a long cable or bending the cable doesn't cause excessive resistance and signal loss, and its connectors will resist corrosion. In some cases this can have a measurable effect on the bit error rate, such as in a noisy environment or with the more complicated modulations used with high data rates. See also the differences between IEEE 1284 conforming parallel cables and los-baratos[1] cables, CAT5 vs. CAT5e vs. CAT6 Ethernet cable, etc.
Will I retire or break 10K?
... without disrupted audio every 2m 25s into a piece. Yes, this is a 2G iPod, yes it's running v1.3 firmware, and yes MP3s play just fine. However, when I try to play an AIFF or SD2 file on it, at 2:25 into the piece (and every 2:25 thereafter) the audio stutters for 2-3 seconds. Funnily enough, a few seconds before this happens (every 2:20s or so) I can feel the hard disk in the iPod thrashing about a bit.
I've provided feedback to Apple about it, but I don't know if anything will come of it. I _do_ hope so, as this was one of the biggest reasons I bought the iPod to begin with (to take a lot of _uncompressed_ audio with me to listen to).
Regards,
John
Falling You - beautiful
I'd consider the iPod if it'd do flac and high sampling. FLAC is brilliant (flawless, open, etc). My Zaurus will do xmms/flac over 802.11g wireless (tho now, without wireless, I convert to ogg), with excellent quality delivered to a nice pair of Sennheisers, and I can read a book at the same time, even.
Why is content still stuck at 44.1. I heard an SACD the other day (1.4Mhz 1bit sampled, iirc, not easily comparable to PCM) and it way fantastic. When are we going to see the rollout of audio tech keeping up with computer tech? IE there is no reason that audio quality cant fall in line with Moore's law. Perhaps when the record labels stop treating their customers as criminals and take a more pro-active role in advancing the presentation of art/noise. Maximizing sensory input is always good. Until then, I guess we route around the presentation industries and synthesize our own music and generate our own machinima... as it should be, perhaps.
Andy
that $2000 can go a long way provided you avoid anything labeled "hi-fi", "prosumer", "audiophile", etc.
Look for equipment designed for businesses, musicians, theater companies. If you see a speaker you like, find out who they OEM'd it from, and buy their generic line. And that way you can get straight performance numbers out of them.
That $2000 spent intelligently and efficiently can get you a system that you KNOW sounds better than anything you can buy in a showroom.
And if you only have $500, you can get something that's really worth it, even if it isn't top of the line.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
n/t
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
This is the Audio Codec used by the iPod.
It has an internal clock generator for the DACs.
The data isn't "clocked" anywhere until the DAC is literally pulling the data out of the filter output buffer. Everything else is asyncronous.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Unless your AIFF is really a generic IFF in disguise with things besides a COMM and SSND chunk, it's always linear PCM.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
There are two types of audio components: those that introduce significant noise, and those that don't.
Any component that introduces less than 0.1% THD falls in the "no significant noise" category, and is interchangeable with any other like component. Nobody can tell the difference between any two amplifiers, CD players, speaker cables, or other things that introduce less than 0.1% THD, unless the component is malfunctioning and making funny noises (clicks, hums, or whatnot). "Audiophile" cables are not an investment; rather, they are an extra tax levied on dimwits.
Frequency response doesn't matter, as long as you can get a flat 20Hz-20kHz. Yes, a 20kHz cutoff means that you'll have phase distortion. So what. It's been well-proven that ears are phase-insensitive.
Then comes the class of components that introduce audible noise. These are all electromechanical: speakers, microphones, phono cartridges, analog tape, and so forth. These all noticeably distort. It's merely a matter of choosing the distortion that most pleases (or least offends) you. In general, flatter response and lower THD is preferable. The degree of distortion is somewhat correlated at low price points, but totally uncorrelated with high price.
I once paid a visit to the office of a friend of mine who worked for one of the best-know makers of ridiculously-expensive audio gear. At the time, I was designing analog integrated circuits, so I knew a little about how to design circuits. I spent a little time chatting with one of their "crack designers" - he was absolutely ignorant, couldn't design a simple amplifier to save his life.
The iPod firmware knows how far in advance it needs to spin up the drive to read enough data to fill the memory buffer it uses to play the next few hundred seconds. It waits until the very last second to help save your battery.
Of course, if the hard drive isn't spinning up fast enough or throwing errors, then it won't read the data in time to make that deadline. It probably doesn't attempt to adjust the lead-in thinking that any errors would be temporary, perhaps due to a sudden shock.
But yours sounds permanently disabled. Send it to get serviced.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
I'm implying the iPod knows there will be a difference in the lead-in required for low bitrate MP3s and high bitrate AIFF. It's just that it probably has a little more leeway in MP3/AAC mode, or maybe because it doesn't have to spin all the way up to fill the buffer fast enough in MP3 mode.
for all you know, in MP3 mode your drive is spinning a lot more than it should be just to keep up, and it's wearing down your batteries.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
This review is poor. I note he omits any anlysis of the iPod's S/N output, which isn't surprising considering that Apple themselves seem to want this on the q-t. This is understandable because almost all other audio handhelds available feature higher S/N ratios. Audition an identical MP3 on a iPod and a Zen NX and you will hear a marked improvement on the Zen.
But the main thing for me that disqualifies the iPod from any consideration as "audiophile" is its lack of digital I/O. This is not new, the old Archos Recorder had digital coax input and output. Now I see the new iRiver 120 has optical I/O, and that sounds exciting.
Da Blog
Excellent, excellent points about audiophile terminology. Speaking as a semi-pro musician/producer for the past 15 ears, AC does an excellent job defining and justifying the non-computerese terminology.
/. crowd picks Crative or Archaos hardware over the iPod based on specs (capacity/price/etc) alone. Nobody ever asks how it sounds.
:)
Reading most of the comments for this article has been very frustrating for me, because everybody wants to laugh at the serious listeners, which to me proves why the
I assume most of the people reading this thread are at least power users - do you ever get frustrated watching a technology noob trying to browse the web? They want to click on pop-ups, leave their mouse pointer positioned over the area they are trying to type in, don't know any keyboard shortcuts, etc -- this is my frustration reading people's comments about perfectly reasonable subjective comments about sound.
Seriously, if you don't know what makes your Red Hot Chili Peppers album better than your Alanis Morisette album other than that you "like it more", you should not be so quick to be cynical in this thread.
Aw crap, while you're at it, mod me up too
It's very simple but you'll need to have a little muscle.
Carry a G5 in one hand (by the handle) and this Honda Genny in the other. All while running iTunes and wearing a pair of MDR-DS5100's.
Pure audio bliss.
why do the headphones suck so much?
I mean those shitters blew after like 30 seconds of Beat It Upright... had to go buy Sonys!
This
Making the iPod sound this crappy was suicide considering what 99.9% of people use it for-- listening to their favorite music. Consumers who want an iPod are forced -- FORCED I tell you -- to slap down more money for products without the features they really need. Apple, drop the style, pay attention to the technology and quality. And put in a second mouse button already, dammit.
Or, that's what Slashdot _would_ have said if the iPod test results were bad. : )
Audiophiles are by-and-large sideline musicians.
They borrow their terminology, their reasoning behind various choices, and run with it to an extreme. Unchecked it kind of drifts off into money-orgy-jargon-infused lala land.
If it were me who had a few grand burning a hole in my pocket, I'd just call up whatever studio mastered my favorite band's last great album, and ask them what they use in the mixing room, and go with that.
Those musicians are working joes, they can't afford bullshit, but it's gotta sound good.
Safe bet there.
The problem is when audiophiles parrot, interact with or try to outdo other audiophiles. Christ.
I get it now. thanks!
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
And why I say that is not because your theory is wrong, but the practice.
If a digital interconnect is working, it works.
If it's not working, YOU'LL KNOW BECAUSE YOU'LL HEAR AND SEE STATIC OR HICCUPS.
So next time, try using a radio shack RCA audio cable instead of a "digital cable" to hook up your DVD player video/5.1 SPDIF to your receiver or amplifier. (I've done this successfully EVERY TIME)
If it works, you win!
If not, get a more expensive one, repeat.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Thanks for writing a reply that I was to tired to... do ...
*sigh*
Just wanted to say I love balanced vs. unbalanced cables and I was wondering if you had any experience with using CAT5 as a cheap substitute.
I've been hearing great things about it from the sidelines.
Imagine, 4 channels using all 4 pairs! Whee.
And a really neat connector that doesn't pull loose when you move around. And you can bend them. Zow!
It seems like a great idea considering the cables are rated to reliably transfer modulated data at 350MHz and up for 100 meters, and that's the cheap, $1@foot stuff.
Eh... just rambling.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Nikki, it was not my intention to do this in front of you. For that I'm sorry. But you can take my word for it, your mother had it coming. When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I'll be waiting.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
"AIFF seems to be the high-resolution ripping option"
AIFF == RIFF == WAVE == WAV == RAW CD Quality bit by bit, if pulled from a digital source of equal samplerate and bit depth and number of channels.
-Tooley-
A was salesman trying to sell a customer a CD player. The CD player in question had a platter like a turntable rather than a tray. You placed the CD on the platter upside down. The idea was that the higher inertia of the platter help playback. The quote that made me turn around and walk right out of the store was:
how many people actually read all the way through this guys long-ass yippity-yappity post? i couldn't bear it...
"off-the-shelf" makes music accessible and viable as an entertainment option. it's called "progress" and "fruits of society" in just about all corners of the world (exept for this guy's living room, apperently.)
instead of wasting another btu on this, i'd rather hear about how affordable, mass-storage portable audio is changing our society. I don't think its changed much since the cassette tape and the "walkman" but that's open to discussion forever.
The iPod is one step toward taking our libraries, instead of only having a few volumes with us out in the field. How significant that is is what i'm interested in.
It's true, the iPod really is the best portable digital player. I've listened to all the portable CD players too and I think the iPod is better than all of them too, plus it's one of the few portables with enough power to drive a decent pair of earphones. It's not as good as my PowerBook G4 headphone jack and certainly not as good as the audio outs on even a basic CD player but what do you expect for next to no battery power and the size of a deck of cards.
The article falsely states that the OS was designed by Portal Player. The OS was actually created by Pixo, by several former Apple engineers. Early iPods even had the Pixo logo in the about box. Further, the human interface was likely designed in cooperation with Apple. So ease of use credit should go to Apple just as much as Pixo. Sun Microsystems recently acquired Pixo.
Here is the sic portion of the article.
One item that's invisible but indispensable is the iPod's operating system, which, I've been informed, is not of Apple design. PortalPlayer, a company that specializes in developing OSes for cellular phones, PDAs, and other streaming and wireless applications, designed the iPod's human interface. The iPod is so easy to use that it's obvious Apple chose the right company for the job.
the people listening to 128kb rips from kazaa don't buy iPods.
it's not very logical, imho. iPods don't usually accompany PC users who ignore/don't care about spy/addware on their machines. The iPod is insignificant to the majority.
The proof will be in the landfills in 5 years... (1 billion $30 CD players along with a trillion mis-burned CD/coasters will out-weigh the iPods in any century)
I see the usual audiophile bashing has started.
Well, I'm an audiophile. Not as much as I used to be but that is largely because I got a system that satisfied me. What was I looking for? Music. Simple really, I wanted to hear the music presented in a realistic way. It is not about numbers, it is about how the thing sounds.
What do I look for? Yes, I know all the fluffy words and have used them myself but here is how it really works in words we can all understand.
Soundstage - there needs to be a third dimension to the sound, classical music should sound like the guy at the back with the triangle is really at the back and not just very small. There also needs to be horizontal accuracy, you should be able to pick out separate instruments and they should sound life size. You would know it if you heard it. No-one has listened to my system and not walked away amazed at what can be achieved.
Bass - this needs to play tunes. It is all too easy to produce fat bass that doesn't play any part in the sound apart from just booming. This is one reason why sub woofers are such a bad idea. The bass should also have detail, a bass note should not just go "boooooooommmmm", it should also go "bwangoommamamooom". That sounds nuts but again once you hear it you will understand.
Mid range - very important, vocals need to sound like a person, a good system will produce a lifelike breathing voice. Especially listen to how 's' sounds. Often it will sound like 'ethz', nasty. Compressed audio is notorious for this effect. Unfortunately, crossovers in speakers can be a real killer, this is where planar speakers such as electrostats and ribbons have a real win over conventional setups. The crossover is generally placed somewhere out of harms way. My speakers have a crossover at 900hz where the ribbon takes over and goes on up from there. This makes for a very smooth sound and that realism I want.
Treble - detail detail detail. You don't want treble that just goes "plish", "tish" or "fish". It needs to have a fine quality, again compressed audio can sound clipped. Listen to the decay of a cymbal. Often it with go "TISH......" when it should go "Tishhhhhhhhhhhhhhh......". Also, there should be a sound of the hit (transient) and then a nice metalic ring. MP3 often loses the transient and the ring becomes more of a hiss. To the normal listener this sounds like the treble is there but again, listen to a good system and it becomes obvious what the deal is.
If the sound has good depth, bass detail, midrange humanity and high frequency attack and clarity then you are doing pretty well. Compressed audio will compromise all of these so you need to make a choice based on the needs of the situation.
Interesting how audiophiles and Linux users have many similar characteristics though. I think it boils down to caring about your experience. I certainly use Linux because I can control my environment and it lets me tailor the system to my needs. The same is true with my audio system.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
The pissy hypocritical posturing on this forum every time an audio related article appears is pathetic. It seems like the only opportunity some of you get to feel superior.
fsck!
"What do you keep bringing that book you know I don't like being read to from out of up for?"
Science fiction for grown-ups...
It is the scroll wheel that they need already! Although one advantage is you can use a Mac and wear a mitten on your right hand.
I really long for an iPod, but there's a little problem: I am an audiophile and a DJ, and as such I've archived my large CD collection completely with Ogg Vorbis... it would take quite some days to convert them from Ogg Vorbis to MP3 :-)
Which leaves me with wanting an iRiver instead, but they aren't as cool as an iPod IMHO...
The skin effect is mainly important at microwave frequencies IIRC and would affect conductivity at different frequencies, I guess. What you're thinking of is likely to be the dispersion relationship of the signal - the relative speeds of transmission of different frequency components. I don't have any figures for audio-frequency dispersion of electrical signals in copper cable, though.
Audiophile journalists rarely know what they're talking about. They do think that they have golden ears however.
How can something be "extended" and "natural" at the same time? Surely he means the the full range is available.
I remember once seeing a bunch of "respected" audiophile journalists (read elitist morons) on TV, in an A-B study of listening to CD's that have just come out of the freezer and the same CD's at room temperature.
Their claim, was that the CD manufacturing process causes cracks (I can't remember if these cracks were in the plastic or the aluminium) which caused distorted sound. Freezing the CD's, so they said, caused these cracks to come back together (while the CD remained cool) and thus the distortion disappeared.
They were trying to claim that CD does not sound as good as vinyl. Never mind the facts about vinyl that":
* Everything above 15kHz gets "rubbed off" after a couple of plays.
* Two channels are encoded into the one groove with an old analog process which then has to be decoded, compounding interchannel modulation, distortion and noise!
* Terrible wow and flutter, comparitively speaking.
I wish I could have been there to point out that if what they were saying were true, then the successful CDROM revolution has been a complete figment of the whole Worlds imagination.
I think it's pretty funny that there is this CD vs Vinyl war going on, when the reality is that the best analog tape decks are far better than the best vinyl units.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
A let-lose crowd of slashdot nerds ranting over audiophiles letting of tons of verbal boohay in the shortest period of time.
A true intellectual rollercoaster ride. Cotton candy and all.
Mind you, but I'll just seat myself in the front row and grab some popcorn. LOL!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What the fuck are you talking about.
TTL, RS-485, SPDIF, DVI-D, IEEE1394, USB-audio, etc. logic is low impedence drive, high impedence load. The electronics DO NOT CARE. If the cable is sub-par (picking up too much noise, too high impedence over a long run), you'll get voltage fluctuations with translate into bit errors, which transforms into missed frames, which translates into:
1) static
2) blocking artifacts in video, or stutters in sound
3) dropped signal completely if it loses sync (provided the protocol standard requires it)
Overheating. OVERHEATING WHAT?>????!! A UART?
Jesus fucking christ.
Out of phase sound my ass. Explain to me how a serialized PCM signal gets "out of phase". Does the cable magically declock, FFT the sound into bands, then reclock and transmit coefficients from one band out of step with the others?
It seems that YOU are the one to whom things don't make sense, and you have built flawed analogies to try to cope with your inability to comprehend the most slightly complex thing. Effortless, stress, WHAT, ARE THERE OVERWORKED GARDEN GNOMES IN YOUR EQUIPMENT? Then you have the nerve to tell me that I'm wrong.
YOU HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE HOW ANY OF IT WORKS DO YOU?
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Matt...
Save the Bottom Line
Gee, my favorite band RECORDS their music with that sound.
Wouldn't it be GREAT if everyone was JUST LIKE US and respected US for WHAT WE WERE DOING...
"What?" is a good question. The answer is jitter. Google for jitter to find out more about the topic of this thread.
that can suffer from jitter.
You honestly think the DAC in your receiver is using the same clock that is used to syncronously transfer data across the SPDIF channel?
Not unless you have an SMTP-E timebase rackmount unit or some shit.
Fuck man, almost every data transfer spec is asyncronous anyway, so it's reg'd up and buffer at least a few times during transmission.
I know exactly what jitter is, and I know exactly that this guy doesn't know what he's talking about BECAUSE IT DOES NOT APPLY.
Does your serial port at 115K suffer from jitter? HUH? Jesus christ people.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Dude, get a grip.
We're talking sonics here, not just bits. The timing of bits matters for music. If you had googled and checked the first music relevant site listed, you would have found jitter.de. Even though you disbelieve, at least you could see that others have found jitter matters in sonics (once again, not so much in just bit transfer).
All your hyperbolic comments (other than the ad hominem attacks) boil down to: jitter doesn't matter.
Guess what? What if it does matter in sonic engineering? What if people can hear the difference?
I'll give you credit for doubting. It wasn't obvious to me (not surprising) nor to the audio industry. I believe Theta Digital and Linn were some of the first to reengineer their audio equipment to address the issue. As a result, they create(d) some of the best sounding equipment anywhere.
Ironically, I believe the iPod may benefit from it's diminutive size. The signal paths are short, so I suspect there's less room for phase distortion of the music running through the electronics. Again, you may believe all the bits transfer (and they may), but that's not the issue.
The issue is the reproduction of the sound and its perception to acute ears. Out of phase distortion can be very fatiguing for long-term listening and can degrade reproduction from foot-tapping music to ear-bleeding noise --- from a music enthusiast's point of view.
There's very little room in that discussion for bit engineering. If it doesn't sound good, who cares what bits went where?
Cheers!
So you too subscribe to "In theory and in practice."
So in *theory* an AAC sampled from master can be of higher quality than the same CD from the same master... the real question of course is have you *practiced* this before you claim an AAC from the iTMS CD quality? You have your own experience with 45s and 38s, and can claim that 45s will often sound worse than 38s.
*I* have my experience with my equipment, and an AAC is imperceptibly different than a CD.
Oh, I'm also curious, do you listen to MP3s?
GPL Deconstructed
I listen to MP3's, AAC's, and ATRACS in various ways; I listen on my computer speakers (which are pretty good for computer speakers, but computer speakers are pretty lousy). I burn to CD and listen in my car CD player. Again, not highest fidelity, but the car environment is very hard on lossy compression. I have one of the very first PJB100's which is a nice player considering it was the first player with HD. Not as nice as an iPod, but very good. I have an ATRAC player, both in my Clie, and in a Sony ATRACS disc player. And finally on a home stereo, again via burned CD's.
The best I can say for lossy compression is that its convenient; its certainly not great.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I will certainly agree with you then. I have an excellent car sound system, and okay home theater, and okay computer speakers. My iPod is better than my computer speakers, but not better than my car system. The tape converter in the car is a bigger audio degrader than the AAC encoding.
AAC is convenient, and an iPod with 1,300 songs is also convenient. There's no substitute I'd rather use, and all things taken into account, it's good enough; and the tracks I purchase from iTMS is also 'good enough' when I consider I listen to most of my music on my computer, via iPod, and in the car.
GPL Deconstructed
But ONLY at the very last stage. Hence, the final clock (which is always internal to your sound card or receiver, integrated digital amplifier or what have you) is the ultimate determination in preventing spread spectrum.
You have no AD stage to worry about. The AD part is done at the studio and cannot be fixed, if jitter was present.
However, if you keep each bit in line and stay digital the whole way until the end, as long as the DA has no appreciable jitter, then the jitter error in the output analog signal will be not much worse than what was already present when it was mastered. At least you can minimize the DA jitter and get as close to the master as possible (assuming the master's timebase was 100% accurate). The easiest way? Do the conversion once with the most accurate clock possible.
That website mostly concerns itself with BOTH the AD and DA stages. The AD stage is quite complicated to resolve, so it may have confused you. Playback of digital data requires no such complex stage.
Everybody, and I mean everybody, sends the data asyncronously and de-serializes into UART buffers at some multiple of the sample width (16-bit FIFOs for RS-435, 128-byte (IIRC) FIFOs on the Envy24 SPDIF controllers, etc. etc.) which is then transfered out via DMA in parallel over standard system buses for processing like an other data (LOSSLESSLY, obviously).
It gets re-serialized by a sound card eventually when fed into the DAC, and the quality of the DAC's clock input is the only part that determines jitter.
The serialization/buffering/deserialization (which is synomous with "data retiming") step at each protocol boundary eliminates any possibility of and bit loss or syncronozation loss between interfaces. I guarantee that every interface in existance does this in the UART because no other design is reliable.
If there was any foul ups earlier on in the chain, you'd lose at least whole place in the significant bit of some value, which would translate into a loud, audible click if it pulled in a high bit into a MSB's missing place accidentally. But most standards use start/stop framing, so you'd probably get a withheld sample frame, which would either be interpolated over or dropped (I/O error, handled in various ways depending on hardware or OS, if any).
The iPod benefits from the excellent WM8371 audio codec with built-in clock generator (at 44, 48, and 96 kHz). The stereophile article details it's marvelous clock stability.
It is also a easily replaced/interchangable component. (May I suggest a sound card based on the CS436X chipset? They are top notch in the jitter, SNR, and common mode rejection department)
Let me restate, your website is correct! It does matter. BUt they don't explain well enough that there's only one point that it matters, and that's at the very END. As long as you don't use any other clock besides the high-quality one at the end, and you don't lose any data along the way, you will hear no artifacts, distortions, or anything (whether audible or not).
Trust me, you cannot "hear the difference" if the processing stages in the digital domain are working (either they are, 100%, or aren't, with loud pops and stutters... binary transmitted data doesn't "degrade" into nearby values in it's native form, it causes serious errors)
I can draw you a series of diagrams explaining the whole if you so desire.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
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of a CD player at 44.1 kHz, sent syncronously over SPDIF using it's own clock, to a receiver playing at 44.05 kHz (it's clock is LITERALLY slower).
What would happen?
Nothing audible (except a slight time shift every so often, I'll explain).
The receiver probably has a buffer about 128-bytes in length. As SPDIF transitions CLK+ high, the receiver reads DATA and inserts it into a sample-width receiver buffer. It left shifts it, and waits for CLK to transition. It does this as fast as possible.
It never misses a bit the CD player can send, because it's always waiting for CLK (and we assume DATA is not spread so much that you cannot reliably read it 1uS beyond the clock transition, that would be a transmission quality so horrible to be unthinkable)
When it reads and shifts 16 times, the async receiver interrupts a microcontroller sitting on the RAM buffer and informs it a sample is ready. Meanwhile it opens a latch behind the buffer to permanently copy it another buffer. The microcontroller wakes up and reads this value into the FIFO from the back buffer. If the FIFO is full, the microcontroller instead ignores the new value.
Finally, the DAC in the receiver, is at the same time, requesting the next value in the FIFO to be copied into a latch while it generates voltage for the previous value to be amplified. If the FIFO cannot give another value, it leaves the old value in the latch.
So the DAC is ALWAYS setting a voltage right on time, everytime. But sometimes the microcontroller presents it a sample ahead of time if it skipped one because data comes in too fast. Sometimes it doesn't change the last value when data comes in to slow.
But never is there any jitter. The only jitter is in how accurately and regularly the DAC activates it's voltage output. The microcontroller uses a buffer to meet to demands of both sides without exposing an underlying clock.
In our case, the FIFO would constantly be full, and sometimes reject a data sent in via the CD player because the DAC in the receiver does not remove them fast enough.
If the clocks were about the same , but experienced jitter, the depth of the FIFO would probably vary as the time bases diverged (and the in vs. out flow varied), but you would always experience jitter from the DAC's clock only in the analog output.
If you put in a pure sine wave digitally through the input, you could precisely measure the output DAC jitter with a spectrum analyzer, regardless of how the digital sine wave is produced (provided that the samples are mathematically equally spaced in the sine function with respect to their order... you get the idea)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Steve, I just realized you were replying to my informative post (not just my claim that I've heard the differences). You must really dislike the idea that cables can make a difference. Wow!
It's funny, my favorite music is the emotionally evocative stuff, but when discussing it, I prefer a more rational discussion. It's definitely tough enough to discuss musicality intelligently without additional hurdles being imposed.
Cheers!
According to ThinkSecret, and confirmed by an image on the international Apple Stores, tomorrow we get recording accessories and memory card readers to store digital pictures and more. Wicked!
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
Read the article -- it has plenty of measurements of performance to keep you happy.
Sure, I find it absurd to spend thousands of dollars/pounds on cables -- but to me it's worth a hundred or so to connect my CD player to my amp, because I can hear the difference very clearly. I was surprised to find that I can also hear, quite clearly, the difference when my CD player is moved between different types of shelves.
The 'audiophile' world is mad, but not generally for lack of measurements. It's the insanely non-linear price/performance that's ludicrous.
McDonalds, Wendy's, BK, et al sell way more food than Shula's Steak House, or any other high quality restaurant. Way more people own Packard Bell's and Gateway's than highly optimized, water-cooled, custom configured CPUs. And, far more people walk into CC or Best Buy and buy a Sony, Kenwood, or (shudder) Apex home-theater-in-a-box than buy separate pre-amps, amplifiers, speakers, and high-grade cables.
The masses don't care about the best, they only want good enough. And even if there are pockets of your life where you care about quality, in other areas you'll be plenty satisfied with "just barely gets the job done".
Maybe you have to be an old fogey (over 30?) to recognize this. And to develop areas in your life where quality really matters to you. Maybe modern consumerism is so concerned about BUYING MORE STUFF and SELLING MORE STUFF that buying and selling GOOD stuff has largely fallen by the wayside.
To pull this slightly back on topic: Much of today's music sucks not just because it is played on cheapy sound systems, but because it is made (compressed, equalized, and other processing applied) to be played on cheap equipment. And most people just don't care - which really annoys the few of us who do.
- Jasen.