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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!
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.
and in next months stereophile magazine....
Our Computer Hardware: Not a Web-Server-Quality Device
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
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.
Sigh....seems the youth of today truly do not know what a good sound system is...all they know is the off the shelf mass marketed stuff at CC or BB..Stuff like that is really only one level above a good boom box.
That's because they're young, don't make much money, and can't afford to spend $2000 on speakers when their younger brother or drunk roommate might spill their snack foods all over it at any second.
If you're going to get all stuffy and pretentious, at least be stuffy and pretentious over what the youth of today listen to instead of what they listen on.
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.
Indeed, I don't see any oversized black anodized allen screws anywhere on these iPods. They're obviously not audiophile quality.
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...
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
"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.
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.
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.