iPods are for Audiophiles 578
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.'"
Re:AIFF (Score:1, Insightful)
I hardly think you can call it audiophile quality without seriously cheapening the work audiophile.
Sigh....seems the youth of today truly do not know what a good sound system is...all they know is the off the shelf mass marketed stuff at CC or BB..Stuff like that is really only one level above a good boom box.
This can't be right... (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone tell him the AIFF is bit for bit identical with the CD, if he ripped it properly. But another reader needed to point out that iTunes has preferences to make it retrieve CDDB entries automatically. Oh well.
Re:AIFF (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because they're young, don't make much money, and can't afford to spend $2000 on speakers when their younger brother or drunk roommate might spill their snack foods all over it at any second.
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.
Youth? (Score:2, Insightful)
You just got it WAY wrong. Stereophile exists to sell music systems. I'm sure JA would quibble with this but, at the end of the day, he'd have to admit this is the primary reason it exists. And many of the people who read that magazine are a persnickity bunch who wouldn't move beyond the 19th century if you shackled'em and threw'em in a donkey cart. Reviews of equipment like this help motivate a voluntary movement on their part.
And at the end of the day it's a review written by a reviewer. Would you go choose to not see a movie based on one bad movie review? Or allow one good review to change your opinion?
That's all it is... an opinion. And magazines like SP don't exist to publish bad ones - it pisses off the advertisers.
Re:iPods are very nice, but my concern is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Comparing an old version of Windows with any current OS doesn't help your argument. Windows for Workgroups is actually DOS with a Window manager. Any modern OS, whether it be Windows XP, OS X, or Linux, is run by a large kernel that supports a wide variety of hardware, and therefore uses a lot more memory. It also runs a number of services that might include a graphical session, networking and other fancy modern things.
I've used both the single-processor G5 and the dual. They're fast. I was actually surprised, since Mac speed hasn't impressed me in recent years and I'm not a 'Mac fanatic.' The G4 fell way behind Intel and AMD offerings, but the G5 is noticeably faster.
When you were copying that file, were you connecting to an SMB share, or using AppleTalk, or what? That 20-minute copy time is weird, and it sounds like a networking issue, not an OS problem. On a 10 megabit network a 17 MB file should copy in under 14 seconds. Even when you take the file protocol into account it shouldn't take over a minute.
In defense of the audiophile (Score:5, Insightful)
Audio quality is something he can't measure yet. The process of how the human ear interprets sound is not yet understood well enough for us to make quantitative measurements of audio quality. I remember reading an interview with an important technical guy at EMU. He said that when Creative bought them, he was shocked to see that Creative engineers were happily designing circuits that measured well, but sounded terrible.
In the abscence of quantitative measurements, audio people have built up a jargon to describe the subjective elements of audio. There are clearly some subjective elements. For example, I ripped some Sheryl Crow CDs to 128kbps MP3. When I played them over my speakers (Klipsch 4.1, nowhere near audiophile quality) they sounded flat, as if I was listening to them through some thick fabric. I don't know what else to call it, but its clearly there, and so using one random jargon term is as good as another.
People here are bringing up wine tasters, and I think that serves as a perfect example. The wine tasters have their own jargon, but all the terms have clearly defined meanings. Just because you don't know the meanings doesn't mean that the jargon is stupid. People complain that we nerds talk about CPUs and GPUs and FSBs instead of using "plain language." Now, would you rather call the thing a GPU or a "drawing thingie?" Would any other computer person have the foggiest idea what the hell you were talking about if you said that you were trying to find the API to send vertex-shaders (gotta come up with a plain-language term for those too!) to the "drawing thingie?" A standardized jargon is important to any field. It might sound stupid to people outside that field, but I think that computer people should know better than most that the jargon really is necessary.
Re:'audiophile' reviewers full of it (Score:5, Insightful)
a warm sound is one that is more bassy, and a bright (it's opposite) sound is one that is more trebly. not in the "subwoofer" sense, but in the range in which the guitar plays. a humbucking les paul would be a very warm guitar, a bridge pickup single coil fender would be a very warm guitar (and sound like an obnoxious 1950's surf solo... to boot)
presence is similar, tho thats usually found on amps instead of guitars. just lingo
tho i agree on the audiophile stuff =)
Re:AIFF (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:'audiophile' reviewers full of it (Score:2, Insightful)
So, what, if someone said something about the gut-wrenching feel of driving an aston martin, you would think that aston martin's are all a bunch of horseshit and hype because they don't actually "wrench" your "gut"?
It doesn't make any sense. Superiour engineering, superiour construction, and superiour materials *will* make a better product (or didn't they teach you that as an EE?).
"Warmth", "Depth", and "Presence" actually *DO* have technical measures behind them, just as much as do "balance" and "timbre" (go tell any professional instrument-maker or musician that those terms have no technical meaning and they'll laugh at you). Sometimes the stuff is hype- so what else is new, but coming up with words to describe something technical is not a bad thing, as humans relate in *experience*. Bad salesman, too, are not new, in any field, but acting like bad salesman mean that an entire field of study, research, and passion is worthless is just silly.
See my post above for my own experience with audiophilism, but please at least try to exorcise your ignorance about the subject (yes, you are ignorant about it, EE or no) by reading something intelligent about it instead of bashing salespeople... you might even *enjoy* learning about the phyics behind the phenomenons that are described as "Depth" and "Presence".
Audiophiles... (Score:3, Insightful)
Audiophile Insanity (Score:4, Insightful)
but the reason they don't back things up with numbers is that in audio, numbers lie. A lot.
I trust cold, hard numbers - carefully applied - much less than subjective and unreliable human hearing.
A 5W tube system may be louder than a 50W transistor system.
Sure, if the 5W tube system is better impedance matched and into a more efficient corner-loaded infinite baffle speaker.
Consider also that perception of audio intensity is logarithmic. To double the volume requires 4x the power - and that's at the cones of the speakers! 50W will not actually sound that much louder than 5W, even with all other things being the same.
A speaker with .002% signal distortion might easily introduce its own distortion due to cheap magnets or poorly engineered cones and not include that, even though the stat says "Total Harmonic Distortion."
If the speaker's distortion figure doesn't include non-linearities caused by the magnets, cones, surrounds or other parts of the unit, I would suggest that this is something you should take up with the Federal Trade Commission.
Even a stat like "Frequency response: 20 Hz - 22 kHz" is useless if the amplification device is not perfectly linear, and no device is.
This is why reputable audio equipment will include a +/-xdB figure in the frequency response claim.
Likewise, most professional audio amplifiers (ie. Crown, QSC, EV, etc.) will cite THD ratings along with the wattage, as in "750W RMS into 8 ohms with 0.2% THD".
Thus, the auditioning of gear on a "well trained ear" is essential to any audio review.
The auditioning of gear is only to check for correct connection, elimination of factory duds, and sheer enjoyment of the music for which you purchased the system.
And this quote is not even that strange; in fact it's just using different language to explain what we want to hear. Dynamics were impressive means that there was a big difference between loud and soft sounds, usually a sign that the device is delivering sound as accurately as possible.
The technical term is called "dynamic range", and it's mathematically described as the difference between the amplifier's noise floor and maximum wattage rating.
imaging was nuanced and detailed, "imaging" is the combination of stereo seperation combined with balanced delivery of all types of sound (eg, bass doesn't linger and treble doesn't disappear),
Stereo separation is measured in dB attenuation, typically by driving one channel with a 1V p~p 1kHz sinewave and measuring the "leaked" signal from the other channel.
Bass doesn't linger if the amplifier has good frequency response, since bass is a low frequency component and requires much less amplifier bandwidth than the 20kHz ratings of most amplifiers.
Treble doesn't disappear if the amplifier is capable of performing +/- x dB from 20Hz to 20kHz, ie. x is some acceptable number (generally under 1dB). In other words, if the amplifier has sufficient frequency response.
and detailed imaging means you can hear sounds move from left to center to right accurately. Nuanced imaging means there isn't a sudden skip as a sound movees from left to right, or from one note to another.
Which means, in other words, that both amplifier channels are well separated and have the same performance characteristics (measurable by science, you know, science, that evil black mathy-type stuff that got man to the moon and gets people heart transplants).
frequency extremes sounded extended and natural means that low bass and high treble signals are transmitted and not cut off because "you won't hear it any way," and that it also isn't needlessly boosted.
Again, see the definition of the term "frequency response". I believe the *numbers* will allay all your fears.
In short, this unit is going to deliver a clean signal to your headphones or receiver, and that's exactly what you want from an audio device.
In other words, for playback to speakers (as oppos
Re:The iPod tastes like fluffy caramel. (Score:2, Insightful)
Then the testee can pick which they preferred. This is of great interest especially if the testee has been spouting off about the superiority of one format or the need for kilobuck cables or whatever. If testee prefers the sound of the original CD through kilobuck cables, then testee really has "Golden Ears". If not, then testee is full of shite.