since i've bought my iPod....

Headphones make a huge difference too, but they're only as good aas the source material.

(please don't take this as an advertisement for the ipod per se, but rather for the randomness of the great music, and the surprises of said randomness)

It doesn't really get to me w/ my ipod, but I can see how it could.

Oh, and the box headphones *are* an abomination.

Who wants to spend all day uploading shit?

Shit that sounds weak as hell at 128kbps...

Get $150 for it on eBay and buy all the Brian Eno reissues on CD.

...is this where I say I don't mind them because I thought the whole point was to have something small and comfortable for listening rather than actual headphones?

"all day"

I think this is where I say I'm kinda glad I'm not an audiophile.

That's not a bad idea at all, stet.

I still use the white earbuds (if you can believe that!), but then again, I also kept the AC Delco stereo system that the truck came with.

I am perfectly fine with my white buds. My audiophile husband however, knew he wouldn't be fine with them, so shelled out $100 for a pair of Shures before he even got his ipod. He loves them. Me, I get a lot of earwax so those in-ear thingies just don't seem very practical to me. I don't like sticking things in my ears.

i heard about a lot of ipod thefts back in nyc, but out here in arizona no one knows what the fuck an ipod is (most people can't afford one, and the nearest apple store is probably up in phoenix).

http://www.calvertdeforest.com/photos/gallery/cowboycal.jpg

http://sonypictures.studiostore.com/images/p/MWC/pdBUMWC0004.jpg

http://www.nndb.com/people/895/000024823/budcort9-harold.jpg

Headphones must be matched to impedance level...Big fancy headphones will (most likely) not get as loud, but sound better.

Dorky sound geek speaks like one unfamiliar to the english.

What I'm trying to say here is that I'm guessing that your headphones of preference are not necessarily suited to the iPod output due to an impedance mismatch. I will skip the details here and suggest a happy medium of either buying the sony earbuds (which sound very good, and fit in the ear canals of those w/small ears, and are loud) or suffering through the lack of volume and reveling in the higher fi of studio headphones w/o uber-volume.

haha mark, my wife just bought me an iPod for my birthday BECAUSE she hated the big clunky koss things I was wearing to listen to music, she was all like "damn, you can't go around looking like THAT"

[admin: link to password-protected image removed]

question (and this is probably 101): why do we rip at a rate? how does that affect file-size unless there is a time limit?

Imagine trying to reproduce oh, I dunno, "Stairway To Heaven" based solely on the first second, the last second, and the track length. Pretty unlikely. But the more seconds you're given, the more likely you are to get it right, and once you start dividing those seconds, you can get to a place where you asymptotically approach total fidelity (the asymptotic curve should explain the cost in file size to jump from "pretty good" fidelity (128-160kps) to really good fidelity (320kps) to lossless)

The relationship is NOT linear, so a file twice as big will not be "twice as good" - you really give up very little at 320kps, and you'd need true golden ears to notice any difference. Most folks are hard-pressed to hear a difference between 128kps and CD, especially with pop tracks, which are often already highly compressed coming out of the studio.

blah blah blah - bottom line: higher bitrate = more slices of the actual source file (CD, .WAV, lossless file) built into the compressed file, more space consumed on your hard drive/ipod.

If your files are still sounding blah at 320kps, you can try messing with the ipod's limited EQ ("Dance," "Jazz," and "Latin" seem to be popular flavors). One issue may be the ipod's sonic signature, which is admirably flat from an EQ perspective, allowing it to take on the flavor of any system it's hooked up to without coloration, but can sound dull if you're used to brighter or warmer sources.

If it's feasible, I'd recommend hooking it up to your stereo (through the line-out, not the headphone jack) and doing some blind tests against CDs through the source you're familiar with. Much as I like my current 'phones, they do sound noticeably better when powered by my home rig vs. powered by the ipod alone.

thx for explanation on compression too.

But different eardrums, different folks.. 320 it is for you, Susan.

for "Drop It":
160 mkbps rate= 5.1 MB
320 rate mp3/aac = 10.3 MB(for some reason the AAC sounds better to me??)
actual file (lossless) = 29.6 MB

-- Susan Douglas

I really hope it just is that, and that you get this fixed soon :) I seem to be one of the few who totally can't stand the bizzare way that iTunes sounds (wrong, to my ears). I've ranted about this elsewhere.

I'm not sure if this means I'll feel the same about an iPod (how does the mp3 decoder work in those things tech people?) but it sure as hell doesn't encourage me! I'm looking at one of these myself - http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/shop/product_info.php?cPath=3&products_id=72 I really hope it doesn't make me sad too :(

The very tentative statement I'm about to make has been known to touch off firestorms, but: this should be the case. AAC (aka mp4) is an ostensibly more efficient revision of the mp3 compression algorithm, which is supposed to deliver better fidelity than mp3 at any given bitrate.

The conventional wisdom is that AAC is superior at lower bitrates up to a point (usually 128kps, which is accepted as roughly equivalent to 160kps mp3), and then it ceases to matter.

In theory though, AAC should always sound a little better. You do seem to have Teh Golden Ears. Consider applying for work at Dolby Labs/THX/etc. They loooooove y'all folks.

that device looks insane, maybe its the answer and you won't get depressed like I WAS. how much is that in us$$?
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thats interesting. i wonder how they conduct sensitivity tests since a person could be hearing diff. but not able to verbalize or even realize it. maybe they measure brainwaves or something. that wuld be a fun job - esp. if i could just lay back and get hooked up to some sound machine.

I might still get an iPod, but only after very careful listening tests (will try and find a nice store) the device I linked... I guess it's the same price as a mid-range iPod would be, 30GB is it now?

b-b-but you can't say "holds 5,000 songz0rz!!!!!111!!11" if you use, say, 192kps as a standard. I get why they do, though it's totally annoying/weaselly that iTunes defaults to 128kps AAC and calls it "high quality."

My bigger gripe is with iTMS for only offering 128kps AAC files. Middling quality and DRM too! Wow! grrrrr....

first iTMS, then that goddamn barber that fucked up my head ;-)

(but if you don't remember the bit from DO THE RIGHT THING, I admit it must sound a little random)

nope, it's an audio stream. You can see "files" when you look at your cd drive in your file browser, but those are fictions--that's why you can't just copy them to your hard drive, they have to be "ripped."

It makes some sense that aac would sound better than mp3; Apple is pushing aac for obvious reasons, and while their aac encoder is industry standard, their mp3 encoder is widely seen as far inferior to at least a few others (LAME, Frauenhofer). Who knows, maybe the iPod actually decodes aac better than mp3 as well, again for obvious reasons...

Guess IM one of the few who thinks that the iPod buds are generally better than *any* headphones/buds that come with portable systems.

Ok, the bass sucks though.

Im pretty sure compression doesnt work in this way. That is, you arent taking 'slices' of time - but instead reiterated information and representing that information with shorter strings (i.e the equivalent of representing 'abbbxc' as 'a#" and 'baaxc' as 'b#')

Lossy compression is based on psychoacoustic models of what the ear can hear (in terms of frequency) - so if a model predicts that certain frequencies are generally not perceived by humans, (even only at a given dB perhaps) then the compression algorithm will be more likely to not represent this information in the sound file, making the sound file smaller. So the compression is not due to increased sampling (representation) per 'second' or the like, but instead based on type of information (frequency).

this diagram actually explains it pretty well:

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/mp3-waves.gif

For those who want to go into this a little deeper: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mp3/chapter/ch02.html

That's the half-chapter from A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters. I think the narrator returns to life at the end, but it's a while since I read it.