03/09/2007, 12:55pm, EST
Friday, March 9th
iPods may oust hi-fi CD players
Apple's iPods and Mac systems playback music with better sound quality than hi-fi CD systems, according to AVI's Ashley James. James cautions that Apple products are nowhere near perfect, but notes that "there are some CD players from prominent manufacturers that are miles worse. They're so bad that from the moment they're on -- if you came into this room with one of these CD players I'm telling you about -- you'd know there was something wrong with it. You wouldn't know what it was, but you'd just say 'that's bloody terrible'." The difference in quality and convenience is apparently causing CD players to lose market share, according to James. Further issues affecting sales of CD players include failed copy protection schemes, as well as the tendency for CD player mechanisms to fail.
The AVI mogul plugged an iPod nano into the most expensive hi-fi systems, describing the music as "slightly hard" but certainly bearable at normal listening levels. James also points to "hi-fi people" who criticize computer equipment as well as MP3 music sources, saying those individuals are not being very discerning.
"A lot of the problems are that the equipment they are evaluating is not good enough to play the music properly. So as reviewers they are making a lot of mistakes. That's the problem with subjective reviewing."
James also speculated that hi-fi CD player sales will continue to drop until nobody is purchasing the devices at all.
"We've seen player sales drop and most people we talk to have said the same thing. There are a number of reasons; the first is that CD player mechanisms are nothing like as reliable as a hard disk mechanism, unless you use a top loader which nobody wants because you can put it into an equipment tray. But I wouldn't be surprised if people end up just buying music from the internet and playing it on their Macs and PCs."
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EQ combined with lossy codec makes a BIG difference in general quality of sound - just reripping CDs from 128bit aac to 256vbr aac brought the cymbals back on my shuffle... Using my decca ribbon tweeter horn speakers with my 60G iPod & 400w amp makes mp3 unlistenable & 128 bit aac barely tolerable - lossless is still a bit suspect especially over airtunes, although I haven't done a thorough comparison...
For more info try:
http://members.chello.nl/~m.heijligers/ipod/Compression/compression.html
http://www.recordstorereview.com/misc/aacmp3part2.shtml
The must have been some re-EQ'ing going on there. It's impossible to simply re-rip a 128 kbps track into 256 kbps and bring anything back when you are dealing with a lossy format.
Woo Hoo! Go iPod/iPhone go, now what could be the next victim in AAPL's sights to be introduced with-in 3 years?? Who knows but it will be great, thats' for sure.
The must have been some re-EQ'ing going on there. It's impossible to simply re-rip a 128 kbps track into 256 kbps and bring anything back when you are dealing with a lossy format"
He re-ripped the CDs from scratch. He didn't convert from 128 to 256.
Uh, lossless is exactly what it says -- lossless. It produces the same exact sound as what the original CD had on it. If there is a problem with sound over airtunes, then it will probably be located in the D/A conversion and filtering -- not the lossless encoding.
Unless, for some reason, the 1s and 0s are different when compressed with lossless.. :/