Slashdot Mirror
Sound Quality of the Fifth Generation iPods?
ntropi asks: "As the drive on my old MP3 player (an iRiver H320) grinds toward its last days, I've found myself in search of a new one. Given the options the new iPod seems the best choice, but I'm hesitating somewhat over the murmurings as to the iPod's supposedly poor sound quality. However, while Marc Heijligers has provided a comprehensive breakdown of iPod performance for up to the fourth generation, I have been hard-pressed to find any information on the 5G's performance. With the exception of this CNET review, which reports that 'Audio quality is quite good and probably better than the previous iPod's, with reasonable bass, distinguishable mids, and shiny highs, plus the audio-output power is quite good.', there seems not to have been any detailed analysis of the iPod's output quality. Thus, it seemed a good idea to appeal to the Slashdot hive-mind for its personal experiences with the 5G's playback, or even analyses that people might have done which were simply never put online."
Only vinyl provides the warmth and depth that the artists really intended --- But Steve Jobs refuses to support vinyl because it won't accomodate DRM.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Ah, you're an "audiophile". For the best sound-quality, I recommend that you get the new deoxidized monster ultraTHX speakerphone cable. It will really increase the "warmth" of the music. We also have in stock a specially shielded cable you can run between the battery and the unit, to remove interference from the battery. And we also have these practical spikes to mount your ipod on, that will reduce vibration from the ground... Moreover, if you open your ipod, and use a green felt pen around the case of the harddisk, it will improve the sound-quality a lot!
Personally, I think the sound quality of most portable audio players are more than adequate for a portable audio player. What I really want is a portable disk-based audio-player that has a completely normal USB harddisk interface to the computer, and that supports ogg vorbis, musepack, flac, and other common formats. But I guess there's no market for that, people really want to limit their choices to the iTunes I guess, and never have a need for portable harddisks in the same unit...