OT: Buying an iPod in Toronto: recommendations please

[James Knott]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 04:14:34PM -0500, James Knott wrote:
>   
>> If listening to a portable player, is there really any point in such a 
>> setup?  The MP3 will put a limit on sound quality, that you can't get 
>> around, no matter how good the headphones.
>>     
>
> A 128kbit MP3 is still far better than the cheap crap they include with
> all MP3 players.  So yes you will get vastly better audio by getting a
> set of $50 or $100 headphones even with MP3s.  As I said, mp3s have no
> problem producing nice clear bass, they tend to loose a bit in the very
> high frequencies, while cheap head phones tend to loose all the bass and
> some of the highs.
>
>   

Again, forget about ear buds. I'm not talking about them. Audio
compression, be it MP3 or VoIP or cell phone etc., impairs audio quality
at all frequencies and levels. The impairments do vary with frequency
and signal levels. At the very least, any digital system will have
quantitize noise, where there are a fixed number of encoding steps. More
steps mean lower distorion, but also more bandwidth required. Any lossy
system such as MP3, also discards some detail, in order to reduce
bandwidth. The MP3 distortions exceed that of good quality HEADPHONES.

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