OT: Buying an iPod in Toronto: recommendations please

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 06:45:44PM -0500, James Knott wrote:
> Again, I've never discussed ear buds, beyond dismissing them. My
> comments were about good quality headphones vs better quality
> headphones. Your audio quality is limited by the MP3 compression and
> also whatever quality the audio output is from the player. Decent
> quality headphones, not ear buds, are capable of superior quality than
> an MP3 can deliver.

Yes they can produce sounds the mp3 doesn't have, but that doesn't mean
the mp3 won't still sound better with the high quality head phones.  The
stuff that is missing in an mp3 is not the same as is missing in the
good headphones versus excelent headphones, so you are still loosing out
on what sound is in the mp3 by not using very good headphones.

If the mp3 lost you 20% of the detail and your headphones lost 25% of
the detail, you probably end up with a loss of 30%, while a set of
headphones that lost 10% of the possible frequencies would give you a
total loss of only 21 or 22%, so you are still far better off with the
good headphones.  You can not say that any headphones that loose less
than 20% will sound exactly the same because the mp3 already lost that
20%.  It's not the same 20% that is being lost.  You simply conpound the
problem at each step.  Use a player with a crappy amplifier or DAC in it
and you will get even more different crap added in.

Sure uncompressed sound will sound better, but it is quite likely that
the mp3 played with excelent headphones will still have better and
clearer sound (less distorsion) than a CD played through decent
headphones.

Now speaking of distorsion in an amplifier/DAC I recently discovered
that on an SB live you should never put the PCM volume about about 80%.
I had some stuff plyaing that was sounding very bad, and for a while I
thought it was the speakers, but it sounded like clipping so I started
messing with the volume settings, and when I dropped the PCM from 100%
to 80% the sound became much much better.  I then just turned up the
speakers instead and got a lot better result.  Seems like a stupid
design to me to make the sound chip clip audio like that but oh well.

--
Len Sorensen
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