iPods are for Audiophiles

Mr iPod Luvver writes "Wes Phillips in this month's Stereophile magazine shows the iPod to be an audiophile-quality device. AIFF seems to be the high-resolution ripping option. Says Phillips, 'Dynamics were impressive, imaging was nuanced and detailed, and the frequency extremes sounded extended and natural.'"

even our music . . .

[Hall and Oates]

sounds great on an iPod!

The iPod tastes like fluffy caramel.

[Prince_Ali]

Says Phillips, 'Dynamics were impressive, imaging was nuanced and detailed, and the frequency extremes sounded extended and natural.'"

What typical audiophile fluff. Why don't audiophiles ever give any opinion that is actually backed up with data. Oh yes, because if they might find out the oxygen-free 00 gauge speaker wire that they paid $10,000 for doesn't make the music taste anymore like caramel than the normal stuff.

next month...

[edrugtrader]

and in next months stereophile [stereophile.com] magazine....

Our Computer Hardware: Not a Web-Server-Quality Device

Incredible sound indeed!

[FearUncertaintyDoubt]

Dynamics were impressive, imaging was nuanced and detailed, and the frequency extremes sounded extended and natural.

OOO, I agree! You can hear every hi-frequency overtone as the Emperor's clothes come ripping off!

and

[b17bmbr]

it comes with a neato car [apple.com] too.

Re:AIFF

[Pflipp]

I TOLD you that the Amiga Interchange File Format is far superior to everything out there! And so is their Fast File System. Heh, even BSD uses it! AMIGA RULEZ!

Uh.. what? Oh... Never mind.

I love audiophiles...

[mblase]

This is just classic, really:

All iPods ship with a pair of earbud-type headphones with 18mm neodymium-powered drivers. These have surprisingly good sound--at least compared to the phones included with most portable players. A pair of low-impedance Etymotic ER-4Ps ($330) offered much better sound and isolation from environmental noise, but that's a subject for another review.

While reviewing the iPod, he just couldn't resist pointing out that another pair of headphones which costs as much as the iPod itself would be the perfect accessory to complete the gadget.

Money is no object. Then again, this adequately describes most of my fellow Mac afficianados as well....

Re:The iPod tastes like fluffy caramel.

[One Louder]

I think the article is a little vague on the details.

What they *meant* to say was that the iPod flows with gusto and verve, with nuanced palpability that is suprisingly smooth and spacious, with harmonic undertones that languidly coil around your nerve endings and deliver liquid bliss combined with in-your-face bravado and euphonic outlines, providing a sonic womb with a sugar-sweet coating of midbass impedance resonance.

Re:iPods are very nice, but my concern is...

[noewun]

There needs to be a Slashdot Troll Hall of Fame, and this needs to be there. I mean, it just keeps going and going. . .

Perhaps it needs to be rewritten, tho:

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I have recently upgraded from a Mac 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM to a new G6 quad 4GHz with AGP 16X and PCI-X to help me at my freelance gig where I needed to copy a 17 Meg file from my home network to a desktop folder. On the G6 it took almost 14 days. At home, on my Ti99/4A, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 4 nanoseconds. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, my iPod will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this. My cat has been run over, the dog is pregnant, my toilet is backed up and I am having shooting pains up and down my right arm. None of this happened before I got the G6!

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My Ti99/4a with 16k of ram running an OS I programmed myself from the back pages of old Byte magazines is faster than this G6 quad 4GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Re:AIFF

[Waffle Iron]

Indeed, I don't see any oversized black anodized allen screws anywhere on these iPods. They're obviously not audiophile quality.

Re:snd?

[inteller]

we are getting ready to release the next story entitled "Uncompressed sound sounds as good as the real thing!" but we think if we put "Uncompressed open source clustered sound sounds as good as evil WMAs" might get a better response.

Apple should make an audiophile iPod

[Anonymous Coward]

Take exactly the same device, put a big heavy-gauge cable on the headphones and multiply the price 5 times.

Re:AIFF

[notque]

If you're going to get all stuffy and pretentious, at least be stuffy and pretentious over what the youth of today listen to instead of what they listen on.

In my day we didn't listen to music....

We had to have it explained to us.... 15 miles up a snow covered mountain.

Re:The iPod tastes like fluffy caramel.

[One Louder]

...which is, coincidentally, how Captain Janeway got Voyager out of a particularly nasty situation involving the Borg.

Re:The iPod tastes like fluffy caramel.

[Elwood P Dowd]

It makes a well recorded track sound almost 3 dimensional with only 2 channels...and give far less ear fatigue than many SS amps I've found.

If you are getting ear fatigue, I suggest putting your amp on a table or shelf.

Re:The iPod tastes like fluffy caramel.

[One Louder]

Eat your hat - most of that was lifted from *actual* quotes from articles in audiophile magazines. All I did was combine them.

No, no, no!

[ColaMan]

This is what happens when you let automated spell checkers do all the work.

iPods are not for "Audiophiles"

iPods are for Audio Files

Jeez, at least proofread your posts before submitting them!

Re:"Audiophile"

[Andy_R]

If you ever find an infestation of audiophiles, try this little trick...

Get them to start gushing about any recording with an electric guitar on it, and then turn the discussion towards how an electric guitar is actually recorded.

Linger on the usage of the distortion pedal and what it does to audio, and the effects of micing up a marshal amp (with accuracy specs if possible), and the use of equalisation in the studio, preferably getting them to repeat after you what a distortion pedal does, how much one costs, and then to confirm that the audio they are talking about was deliberatley put through one, by the artist, in order to distort the audio.

Sometimes their heads will actually explode.