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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?
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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.
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.
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.
In my experience, Apple's warrantee attitude is "here, have a new one." Not quite the same thing.
And the Carbon is more than double the weight and 3 times the physical volume. If you're going to use specs for a comparison, you need the whole picture.
It's $249 for the 4 GB.
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.
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
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
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.
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!