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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 like Apple products unfailingly myself. But then, I'm not a newspaper columnist.
Seriously, has anyone ever read anything by Mossberg about Apple products that wasn't either glowing, stellar, or outright raving?
define "better"
SNR/THD/A2D/SPL/HZ/BR ?
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.
How could he tell if the audio signal was crystal clear if he was "going 70 mph in a convertible with the top down"?
Why is he wasting paragraphs on trying things out that are there in black and white in the specs?
... or subjecting it to repeated drops to verify that it wouldn't skip. It's flash memory. Shocks and vibration are not going to be an issue.
"It has two GB of disk space. I tried putting 1.5GB of songs on, and there was room for another 0.5GB of data to spare!"
It does look like quite a nice gadget -- but I wouldn't personally buy anything with less than 20GB for songs.
Newspaper content today is embarassing. Huge sections like "Food and Wine", "Drive", and "Technology" (i.e. ads for buyable gadgets).
A good exercise for students: Take a daily paper, discard all the ad sections, then cross out all remaining ads, then cross out all stories that promote products, then cross out all stories based on political figures saying something, and see what's left.
News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity.
I get 401k and health insurance through school is pretty good unless I get cancer or sometime. The Nano (even though I don't need or even really want one beyond the new toy factor) would go a long way to make up for the low pay, 12 hour shifts and lack of appreciation. Its the principle.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
it's smaller.
battery lasts longer.
its more dependable.
has more space than shuffle, but smaller size.
color screen.
pry himself off of Jobs' leg, he might point out that the nano doesn't have a radio, does have the same ol' crappy EQ settings, and won't work for transporting data (yet). Despite all that, $249 is an amazing price point for 4 GB of flash memory, and with any luck competitors will come down to match it with more fully featured products.
"The adjective smitten has 2 meanings:
Meaning #1: (used in combination) affected by something overwhelming
Synonyms: stricken, struck
Meaning #2: marked by foolish or unreasoning fondness
Synonyms: crazy, dotty, gaga, enamored, infatuated, in love, soft on, taken with"
So I suppose we shouldn't really take this review seriously.
Sigs are for the weak.
This is the best iPod yet, though of course I do need more capacity. I think it's silly for people to complain about $199 for 4GB, though. You know, it's like looking at a Mercedes and saying, "$50,000 for four seats?!" Of course, there's more to a car than how many people it can hold. And the iPod is certainly the finest music experience out there - by far.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
From the summary: "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.'"
Ooooh! He's trendy (new MTV music), he's rich and stylish (convertible), and he's a wanker (blasting noise pollution).
Please, please, can I be like him? I'll definitely buy a Nano now!
This is a prime example of why trendiness drives iPod sales.
Not to upset the fans or anything, but why is this necessary in an article about a new product?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
And the damn thing still doesn't come with a built in radio. I don't know what in the hell Apple is thinking, as almost all of the other MP3 player manufacturers added an AM/FM tuner to their products years ago.
Sure, having 1000 songs in your pocket is cool, but what if I want to listen to a live news or weather report? What am I supposed to do, carry around a separate radio for that?
Flash is expensive.
Microdrives are expensive.
If you want 4gb of flash or 6gb if microdrive, the iPod is one of the CHEAPEST ways to do so. Always have, as far as I can tell.
GPL Deconstructed
Also the Wall Street Journal, where Mossberg writes - a fact you could have checked by reading the article or looking at the URL.
sulli
RTFJ.
And since you clearly didn't read the article, the quote was: 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.Notice that he said "loudly" enough, being impressed by the volume that his car stereo was producing, not the volume of the iPod. Face it, the guy made a nonsensical statement in his effort to gush all over the nano.
Because then they couldn't have used the cool "nanotubes" name... :-)
define "better"
SNR/THD/A2D/SPL/HZ/BR ?
You actually have a very good point, AC.
The portable audio world is long overdue for a serious evaluation of all the handheld players out there, with both subjective double-blind listening tests and electronically measured performance specs.
The ideal test would first compare all players using lossless playback (if available), and then compare them once again using the "suggested" compression format for each unit (128 AAC for the iPod, WMA for the Zen, etc.)
I've heard audio critics praise the lossless playback performance of various iPod models before, especially when using the line-out from the docking port instead of the headphone-out on the top, but to date I know of no serious audio magazine which has done the sort of comparison they would do when evaluating CD players or Tuners.
Has anybody seen anything like that, and if so, do you have a link?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Not necessarily. You have to consider your audience first. Quick quiz: What's the difference in the audiences for Popular Science or Discover and MIT Tech Review or Scientific American? Teen People might have a technical gadget review but do you think S to N ratios would make it in? And yes, the Wall Street Journal will have some savvy readers but I'm guessing that they understand their demographics and then publish reviews accordingly.
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.
Even "us kids" understand that you need a clean signal to amplify, but if that's truely what he was talking about then TFA should have been clearer, I mean, he's a tech reviewer for pete's sake! "packed with plenty of audio power" is not the same as "has excellent sound quality".
In Short: guys, why do you even read this? This guy is a journalist who has been given a nice gadget. I suspect him to mean nothin in specifig, but using stupid buzzwords. Open your eyes, it's a MP3-player after all! Of course, if you put high quality MP3 in it, unless the mpeg-chip is crap or they seriously messed up the board design the sound is going to be great. Not quite CD, but great. Do you ever suspect a Journalist to hear the difference, in a car, a open cevertible, at 70 mph ?????? And yes I'm jealous of the guy, for I should have tested the thing on a nice summer day in the convertible. ... /me going back to my cubicle.
According to Cage the artistic value of 4'33" was in being a member of an unsuspecting audience that progresses from expectant silence to speculative chatter to full conversation.
This value can only really be achieved in a live setting, where the audience is expecting an orchestral piece and doesn't already know the nature of 4'33".
Strangely, this isn't that far off from the experience of reading rumor sites in the weeks leading up to Apple keynote speeches.
Kevin Fox
No gapless MP3 playback! Come on, the Rio Karma could do it years ago. I've got a 1st gen Mini now, but I won't buy another iPod before they can do gapless. Mix albums just don't work now.
.sc
Of course, they'd have to start with iTunes. A jukebox that can't do gapless is severely b0rked IMO.
I can not speak for the iPod in general but typically, line out jacks provide at least 150mv and should be in the 47kohm range for impedance matching to other standard stereo components. A headphone jack typically runs much lower in the 32 ohm range.
To follow the "standard", a piece of equipment should have different output stages to achieve the difference in impedance between the two different jacks. An impedance mismatch will result in distorted waveforms at different frequencies as will any encoding (I assume your testing square wave playback file was from a non lossy compressed or raw wav format audio clip) . Just my $.02
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Why are there still so few portable players that play gaplessly? Is it just that most people are ignorant about gapless playback and thus it's not a selling point? Seems to me that a company could make a gapless player and then advertise the hell out of it.
I'm just glad that they ported Rockbox to my iriver H120. I know there're a lot of people who aren't as fortunate.
What impresses me the most about the new played is that it's flash based, instead of hard drive based. In the past, my mp3 players that were HD based had a lot of problems with durability.
I currently use a Rio Karma (which I'd love and recommend, if it held up well), but I travel with my player too much, including biking. HD based players are much more easily ruined by jaring motions, drops, etc. Your HD begins to degrade, sometimes songs skip or the player freezes up. Perhaps you cant use the full capacity of the player for very long.
Since an music player is mostly in 'read' mode, the fact that flash memory will eventually wear out is very acceptable. The nano should last until a much nicer player comes out that has a much higher capacity for the form factor.
I've never been interested in apple products before (my rio does a lot more than the apple products do - ogg support, better playlist support, DJ modes, etc), but it's on it's way out, due to the HD. When it dies, I know where i'll be looking next...
The reason the iPod has been doing so poorly in Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere in Southeast Asia is size. People there like their mp3 players TINY -- they don't give a guff for capacity as long as it's super-small and shockproof. The Shuffle was a step in the right direction, but without a display its capabilities were limited. The Nano is perfectly poised to make serious inroads into the Asian mp3 player arena, if they market it well enough.
Now if they added recording capabilities (which Asian students often use to record lectures, for some reason), the Japanese manufacturers would really start to sweat.
Someone else already said it, but this guy clearly doesn't know very much about technology. He thinks the Nano is powering the output of his car's stereo? Come on!
I'm an iPod fan myself - I own a 3rd generation 10gb - but Apple really needs to start doing something with the iPod other than making it smaller and changing the screen. I mean, come on, the "photo" thing is useless. There's absolutely no reason for an iPod to have a color screen. They should be adding new functionality that's actually useful... recording, anyone? Radio, perhaps? But of course, that would probably make the iPod less profitable. Bah.
Gapless playback would be great, too. I'm sure they could do that with a firmware update, so what are they waiting for?
Oh, and they really need to do away with the white and silver design. I know it's popular, but the Mini didn't look like that, and it still sold well. The white and silver design sucks. It looks really pretty - until you take it out of the box. Every time you touch it, you're going to leave a finger print on there, even if you wash your hands first. And don't even think about putting it in your pocket if you don't want to scratch it. Cases don't help. While they're at it, they could make the battery removable...
Of course, it doesn't really matter. People will keep buying them, and I'll certainly keep using mine. But the iPod is hardly as perfect as some people seem to think it is.
If we're talking about the iPod hardware (not familiar with the feature), I would think that it would probably be simpler to use a compressor than a normalizer. To normalize, you need to know the peak level of the whole track, which means you need to read the whole file in before playing it (or have the info in some database or metadata). With compression, it's working with the dynamic range of only the immediate length of time.
(Assuming I've got the concept of compression/normalization down right. I'm pretty sure I do.)
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
I almost replied to this before, but decided not to. But now it's been modded up? Bizarre. It barely even makes sense.
Maybe I'll explain it simply for you:
1) Most people listen to their iPod in their pocket (or clipped to something). Presumably you would rather not be linked to a bag by a headphone cable if possible.
2) Pockets are quite small containers, often pressed up against skin by the outer layer of material of clothing. They are most commonly available on humans around the thigh region, or in warmer weather requiring a coat, around the waist area.
3) Pockets are available in a range of sizes. In many cases, large pocket size is sacrificed for the fashion or style of the containing garment. In warm weather, wearing a jacket to provide a large pocket may be uncomfortable, leaving only smaller thigh-region pockets for storage (buttock-region pockets may also be available, but are not favoured due to the difficulty in sitting down when they are full.)
4) Large items in too-small trouser pockets either make the human wearing the trousers look like a sex offender (if the pocket-owning human is male) or press against their leg, causing discomfort.
4) We can conclude from the previous four statements that, for many people, smaller iPods are desirable.