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A Review of the iPod nano
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Walt Mossberg has been testing the iPod nano for a few days, and he says he is 'smitten.' Mossberg writes in the Wall Street Journal, 'The nano has the best combination of beauty and functionality of any music player I've tested -- including the iconic original white iPod. And it sounds great. I plan to buy one for myself this weekend, when it is due to reach stores in the U.S., Europe and Asia.' Among other things, it has surprisingly good sound: 'Despite its small size, the nano sounded as good as any other iPod, and is packed with plenty of audio power. Plugged into my car speakers, it was able to belt out the new Fountains of Wayne rocker, "Maureen," loudly enough to be heard perfectly, even though I was going 70 mph in a convertible with the top down.'"
I believe the reviewers point was that the iPod put out enough power for the car stereo to do its job. I don't know about anyone else, but a lot of previous generation equipment (from tape players, to CD->Tape conversions, to early MP3 players) often were unable to produce much volume, period. Many suffered from loud hissing that further degraded the quality of the sound.
In short, the reviewer's point was that the iPod puts out a crystal clear audio signal that sounds good and can be easily amplified with no apparent loss in quality. Make sense?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
And AFAIK, the iPod Mini has lousy sound quality. The Shuffle, surprisingly, has the best sound quality of all Apple's digital players.
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I've tried my share of portable players and there IS a considerable difference among them in output sound quality. The reviewer never claimed that the nano could drive the car speakers, he said that the sound qaulity was great when amplified through the speakers. And that IS a distinguishing characteristic.
Exactly, as an intern getting a free mp3 player should be second fiddle to things like health insurance, or lack of 401k. sorry, but ppl are bought off too easy with junk that won't matter in a few years; health and retirement will be long term issues.
bad_outlook
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Is this vague enough for you?
Seriously, has anyone ever read anything by Mossberg about Apple products that wasn't either glowing, stellar, or outright raving?
Sure. He finds the "Mighty Mouse" inferior to the Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 5000. Check out this article.
The shuffle has been known to have better sound quality than the regular iPod because the hard drive causes some interference which can lower the sound quality, apparently. The new nano should benefit in the same way.
... at ~18 hours of battery life, 5Gb of storage, and -$50 in price. The only downside is Rio's dropping support. Given Apple's "just buy a new one" attitude on warrantees, that's barely a negative.
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
Every iPod so far has had the capability to transport data, so I don't see why this one would be any different.
Firstly, a review that just regurgitated the spec page in English instead of tables would be boring. Secondly, if you ever look outside /., you'd find a lot of people who do not know things like "flash memory is more resistant to impact than hard disks" (not because they are dumb or lazy, but because they never had a reason to investigate it). Thirdly, the number he was talking about was not disk space, it was Apple's marketing line of "1000 songs"- again, not everyone is sufficiently knowledgeable about computers or their music collection to mentally convert that to gigabytes on-the-fly.
The nano actually allows a car stereo sytem to amplify the sound! What will Apple think of next?
;)
Seriously, what kind of reviewer is impressed by this?
A reviewer who knows anything about analogue audio tech. There are things like impedances, voltages and signal to noise ratios involed in a task like this. Few devices can actually output a signal which is truly suitable for amplification.
You kids these days don't realize that 24 bits at 96 KHz isn't worth jack shit if you don't have a clean signal chain all the way through... digital audio is only pristine as long as it stays digital
.: Max Romantschuk
AAC is not a closed format and DRM is not required. You can use iTunes to rip your CDs to MP3 or AAC and they will work wherever you want. DRM is only an issue when you are buying an AAC online from the iTunes music store.
Apple has sold 10M+ radioless iPods, and iPod marketshare dwarfs the radio-equipped MP3 player marketshare. Clearly, a built-in radio is not a must-have feature, despite what you think.
If you just gotta have one, then yeah, carry one of these around.
It's $249 for the 4 GB.
If the WSJ is caving, they've been headed down the road for quite some time. Mossberg has been doing technology review columns for as long as I've been reading the WSJ (8 years now), probably before then.
He's no shill either--he'll freely and frequently criticize problems or missing functionality. The tech dev community comes in for frequent bashing, primarily due to their (IHO) utter cluelessness regarding usability. He'll also point out "good but could be better" things as well. Ars Technica he isn't, but he's way,way up from, say, PC Week.
Lee Gomes has been doing a similar type of column, focused more on Internet/cyberspace than gadgets, in the WSJ. for some time.
Both columns are (IMO) well-written, topical and substantive. You could do a lot worse than them.
Sibilance may be a problem with poorly encoded MP3s, not with the Rio. I own an empeg/RioCar which using similar technology has none of those complaints.
What the review offered the press releases did not:
Varification of battery life. Did you honestly trust the manufacturer claims for battery life outright?
Real-world storage. While he didn't give an exact figure, you can extrapolate a more real-world idea of how many of your songs the nano might hold based on Mossbergs rough explanation of Apples standrd being larger than older music.
Audio output strength - roughly the same as other iPods. They could have reduced it to save battery life. Please note I did not say Quality as you cannot determine that from the convertible test.
Improved description of size. The business card analogy was particularily good, though I am sure he reversed that - he said cut 20% from a buisness card when really I think he meant 20% longer.
So basically there was a lot of information there, if you chose to read the review carefully. Plus it's always more interesting hearing a real user speak about how it is to use. You can only trust them so far, but it's just like movie reviewers in the regard.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If I turn up the bass booster in the equalizer, I get overdriven bass which seems to become even worse with music encoded at a lower bit rate (most of my music is encoded with Apple's lossless encoder). The sound check (which is supposed to equalize the volume of all the songs) really seems to flatten the dynamic response of the music. I use it in the car since I'm just hooking the iPod to my stereo with a cassette adapter anyway, but I can tell if it's on when I'm using my headpones.
Another semi-unrelated problem with the iPod is that it seems to not quite have enough processing power to play some of the lossless-encoded music. These songs can clock in at over 1000kbps which can result in the iPod halting play for a few ms while it rebuffers. This is while it's sitting on the desk, too, not while I'm jogging or something.
All in all I LOVE my iPod and am very happy with it. I just wish it maybe had a little more processing power so it could do a better job maintaining its audio quality while playing high bitrate music and/or running it through its post-processor.
www.clarke.ca
Actually, it's not only the amplifier, unfortunatelly :/
It's also all present today dynamics compression...apparently in some part driven by the fact that more and more people listen to music on the go or i a car :/
And it's actually quite disastrous.
Some details:
http://www.loudnessrace.com/
Recent Hydrogenaudio discussion: (look at visualized samples at least...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
You can use the "Shuffle by album" setting, which means it selects an album by random and plays it from beginning to end. I also prefer listening to complete albums on my iPod.
Lalala
Gapless means without that little blip of silence between tracks. Gaps are created when a player doesn't pre-cache the next song and has to load it, or when the ending song has a frame-based codec. It's possible with AAC and maybe Ogg (though I don't know if the iPod caches or not so there may be a gap anyway), but MP3 works in frames of sound of uniform length (some fraction of a second), hence the end of the last frame has to have some silence at the end unless it lines up perfectly, which is rare.
The voltage levels for line inputs have been standardized for years and is quite non-critical anyway -- while standard line level is 2 V P-P for 0 dB, if this particula box only produced 1 V P-P for 0 dB, that would only be 3 dB down, which is a couple clicks of the volume control on a typical deck.
Impedances are even more trivial -- a typical line input as an impedance around 15 K ohms, which is easier to drive than the 600 ohms (or so) of a typical headphone. In any case, it would take considerable extra trouble to design a solid state amplifier that had problems driving a 15K input impedance. At the risk of oversimplifying, the basic idea is that the output impedance of the source should be substantially lower than the input impedance of the sink. A typical solid-state design has an output impedance down in the single digits (or less -- for a big power amp, you might see an output impedance in the milliohm range).
As far as signal to noise ratio goes, the SNR of the iPod should greatly exceed what's usable in a car. Even quiet luxury cars typically have noise levels around 65 dB SPL or so. If you limit the maximum volume to (say) 110 dB SPL, that means your environment only has about a 45 dB SNR. 24 bit sampling theoretically gives an SNR around 120 dB. Apple's analog section probably reduces that a little, but they'd really have to screw things up for it to become a problem under the circumstances.
The bottom line is that driving a line input in a car means next to nothing.
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The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
This was done years ago.
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It did very, very well on all those regular THD, SNR, etc. tests. "better many CD players". Given the limitations of the size and availability of power (battery can't come close to a wall socket in ability to deliver oomph), it is a near miracle.
Of course, much of that miracle came from Wolfson (the DAC used in the iPod), and so all the iPod competitors can do the same if they just get the analog parts on the output amps right.
But anyone who says the iPod is objectively bad on audio quality is off their rocker. It may be bested in some areas, but the differences between the iPod and its competitors (especially in the negative direction) are miniscule compared to the overall excellence of any of these devices.
I mean, seriously, bitching about 96dB S/N instead of 100dB? The average background sound level in a room is 40dB or more, so you can't get even 96dB S/N to your ears unless the peaks of the music are hitting 136dB. Is your system doing that? And besides that, these S/N tests show the iPod clears 100dB by a little bit anyway.
As to your bass compaints (which are spot on), perhaps under all this pressure, Apple has seen the light with the Nano, we'll have to see some measurements. Note that into a high impedance (line level) input, even the mini has no bass problems, even from the headphone out. Because the output caps create a rolloff filter with the impedance of the load. On 16 or 32 ohm headphones, the rolloff might be distressingly high (40Hz?), but when you kick the load impedance up to 1K ohms, as a line level input is, the rolloff retreats down to below 10Hz.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Saw this the other day and it made me laugh... suddenly it's relevant to a /. article! Check it out... it's pretty funny.
10100111001
I was looking at the Shuffle, then I realized you can't change the battery. When the battery no longer holds a charge, you gotta toss it. That was what pushed me over to getting an iriver T30.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
The reason the ipod sounds horrible when you use the equalizer is not really the ipod's fault. It is your mp3s that are at fault. The reason they sound so bad is they are recorded at a level that leaves no room to boost any frequencies without distortion... let me explain. The EQ in the ipod is a digital one, and a digital signal can only be so loud before it runs out of bits and is clipped. Most songs are recorded right up to this digital limit of volume level to get the highest signal to noise ratio possible, but this also leaves no room for boosting using a digital EQ. Therefore any EQ setting on the ipod that is trying to boost frequencies can lead to severe clipping causeing the sound to be horrible even at low headphone volume level. The solution is to lower the volume of your MP3s that you load onto your ipod leaving room for the EQ to do its job without clipping. You can do this using various software, but the one I like most is called MP3Gain (google search for it). You just set what target dB level you want, it it changes the headers of your mp3s to reach that level, without changing the actual data of the MP3 itself (it only changes the header to use a multiplier of sorts to adjust volume). When you load these adjusted MP3s into your IPOD you will find you can use all the EQ settings with absolutely NO distortion at any headphone volume. And because the final amp of the IPOD is so good you will still get ear shattering volume despite the MP3s being slightly lower in volume. The difference in sound quality is stunning! Try it! No more shying away from using the EQ (which is a very high quality one in the ipod). There is lots of info around about this topic, just do a google search for ipod EQ distortion, and you will find more detailed info on why this works. Hope this helps!
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2005/0908/nano
Emerald Astrology
I do not have an iPod either, but your comments of typical gear are incorrect. Typically, line-level outputs have a source impedance of 150 ohms. Speaker-level outputs are obviously much lower, many around 2 ohms. Line-level inputs are typically 10-15kohms, sometimes as high as 50kohms. Impedance matching is only valuable for maximum power transfer. This was a requirement for very old systems that were power-based. Today, virtually all audio circuits are voltage based. A low source impedance and high input impedance permits bridging (one source to multiple inputs) without overdriving the source. So a low-impedance to high-impedance circuit does not distort the waveform. If the input is a lower impedance than the output then it could lead to distortion because it's drawing more current (basically overdriving the output circuit.)