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."
My new one sounds a teeny bit cleaner than my old 3G 40GB.
The issue with the bass rolloff with low impedence phones [IE in ear monitor style] is still there, but not as severe. all that requires is the use of the EQ + mp3/aac gain anyway.
overall i like the way it sounds. i know that probably doesn't help much.
i saw the baby, and the baby looked at me
iPod's audio quality isn't the best. Its not overly powerful, its quiet on most good quality headphones. I here some faint digital "chatter" in the background, such as noise caused by the hard drive (or so I thought). I still hear this chatter on my Shuffle without any moving parts, so this leads me to believe that its a hardware issue. However, I don't here this chatter on a good quality pair of headphones like Sony DJ's or Sennheiser's, only on the really crappy Apple headphones which are way too tinny for my tastes. Not enough bass comes out of Apple's headphones. I generally have not heard any static or background noise as I have heard from cheaper digital music players.
When you hook the iPod to any good receiver or external speakers, the audio quailty is about as good as any digital media player. A system with good bass and good processing handles the relatively weak output of the iPod well for good overall sound.
The end result is, NO digital media player is for audiophiles, but the iPod is about as good as any. You will get lots of bias feedback saying Apple is the best, or the worst, but its about middle of the road, the digital chatter I hear is annoying only if you like your treble levels high, which most people don't.
In the end, compared to Creative or another comparible price/featured product, I doubt your going to find any of them setting themselves appart greatly in terms of audio quality. Only that the Creative actually uses a real equalizer feature to help fine tune things unlike the cheesy presets Apple uses. In my experience, using ANY iPod preset results in lousy audio quality as their digital audio processing isn't that great and make the music sound overly processed.
Would I not recommend the iPod based on audio quality alone, no. There are a lot more features and benefits using an iPod then a few audio quirks which are mostly overcome using better speakers/headphones. Just that I get sick and tired when people seem to feel that one digital audio player is better sounding the the next, except for really cheap ones, most in the $300 range are comparable, just depends how much bias is behind the person recommending them.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The review is at http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/93 4/index.html.
"The iPod's measured behavior is better than many CD players--ironic, considering that most of the time it will be used to play MP3 and AAC files, which will not immediately benefit from such good performance. But if you're willing to trade off maximum playing time against the ability to play uncompressed AIFF or WAV files, the iPod will do an excellent job of decoding them. Excellent, cost-effective audio engineering from an unexpected source.--John Atkinson"