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Inside the iPod, Past and Present
We mentioned the iPod Shuffle dissection a couple of days ago. Reader UtahSaint writes "Electronic Design have got a neat little article giving non-Apple employees
an insight into the makings of the original iPod and the revisions made (on a technical level) with the 2nd and 3rd generation iPods. The third-generation iPod contains two power-management chips from Royal Philips Electronics, a TEA1211 and a PCF50605. The TEA1211 is a dc-dc converter that can switch automatically between step-down and step-up operation in response to changing input voltage. The PCF50605, a single-chip power-management unit (PMU), can adjust power-supply voltages to the lowest thresholds needed for functions in a particular power domain." And finally, sammykrupa writes "PC Mag has a great review of Apple's iPod Shuffle. It covers the quality of the audio output saying that it is has dead-flat frequency response, less harmonic distortion, and most notably, better bass response than its bigger siblings. The older iPods, especially the Mini, have been rightfully criticized for being somewhat deficient in bass, and although the bigger players have flat frequency response, they have trouble sustaining big bass notes."
The older iPods, especially the Mini, have been rightfully criticized for being somewhat deficient in bass, and although the bigger players have flat frequency response, they have trouble sustaining big bass notes.
The iPod is designed to take with you and hear music on the bus, or while jogging - with headphones. Does it really matter how good the bass is if you listen to it with headphones anyway? I think not.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
I'm glad they improved the audio quality - the iPod doesn't really fare very well compared to the so-called iPod killers (and that's something you can measure objectively, before you get too defensive of that expensive white box you so treasure).
I had a 3rd gen, now I have a 4th gen. Both drove my Grado SR-60 headphones (think Radar from Mash) just fine. In fact- they do a noticeably better job driving them at low frequency than my Powerbook.
Any problems with low frequency response probably have something to do with the fact that, despite the Steve Reality Distortion Field, you cannot get good low-frequency response in a tiny little earplug. You can put marketspeak on your website till the cows come home about Neodymium magnets make 'em better- they're still just tiny earplug speakers.
Please help metamoderate.
"La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever." (Perfection is achieved, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away).
-- Antoine St. Exupery (1900-1994)
I've compared an .aiff file played back through my computer's rackmounted audio interface (made by MOTU, for those who care, and also connected to the Soundcraft desk) and the same track played back from the iPod. I don't hear a significant difference in bass response. The people who complain about bass must be using 'phones with impedance that doesn't agree with the iPod's headphone jack.
"Clean up the air and treat the animals fair" - Captain Beefheart
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The terminology surrounding the sound quality is quite confusing. Namely, suggesting that it is flat but has better bass response or that it is flat but has trouble "sustaining" big bass notes hardly makes sense.
Flat is flat. Either the old players are not flat and deficient in the low frequency spectrum, or the new player is not flat and has some kind of boost. The fact is that when most people hear flat they think, "Where's the bass?"
The article says nothing of the test data, equipment or methodology used to determine just how flat the frequency response is and "critical listening" on some mystery monitors hardly counts as valid.
I suspect that your headphone assertion is correct.
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
You mean the printed circuit boards? Good point.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
You can probably come close, but beating it is going to be pretty hard. To match the size is going to take a mini-itx motherboard ($175 or so for an M10000), a 2.5" harddrive ($75 or so for 40G), optical drive ($100 or so for a dvd/cdrw), ram ($40 for 256M). I've now spent $390, still needing a case/PSU (and still larger, albiet only slightly). This is going to be *well* short of the Mac mini in performance, (especially at graphics - unichrome is nowhere near a radeon 9200 mobility), and you still don't get OSX.
:-)
If your wife wants a cute little Mac, let her have it
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
Apple apparently cornered the market for the Toshiba disks for a while. But now there is, inevitably, an alternative. Hitachi now makes a disk that size
Buried in the article, there was this key fact. Owning all the tiny hard drives on the market for more than a year translated into a long-term perception advantage for Apple -- that iPod == Smallest == Sexiest now and forever.
Had they not had the foresight to monopolize the formfactor, the iPod would have been one of a half-dozen similar models on the market just as it was picking up and it might have been lost in the pack (especially because the early models were firewire only).
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I think the problem is that other small, low cost players from other manufacturers do include a small screen.
So it woul dbe like comparing the Kia to another econobox that does have features that the Kia is missing.
That's silly, really, since Apple's the one that designed the UI. Synaptics had nothing to do with it. I'm sure one major problem of Apple's was beating the "simplicity" concept into the Synaptics engineer's heads.