Topic: hack your IPOD to record

[John Kelly]

Better than the Ipod, because of price and sound quality.

How is the sound quality better?

[Lil Kim Jong-Il]

I keep thinking, I can't believe Apple lost marketshare to this...

Apple didn't lose market share to MS, they lost it to IBM back when big iron was king and the closed architecture didn't help.


Is there anyone making any 24-bit portable?   Even that recordable iPod is 16 bit.  That is when I'd jump in.  I'm with GQJSP in that I don't want to continue to purchase devices limited to 16 bit resolution.  Everything except my car is updated now for high res and it would be nice to do away with down sampling alltogether.

[spyder9]

Better than the Ipod, because of price and sound quality.

How is the sound quality better?

Did a a lot of research on these 2 last year.  A lot.  Checked out all the comparisons that were done.  Read all the experts reviews.  Read a lot of consumer reviews.  Jukebox consistently beat out those in its class for sonics.  Ipod got the nod for sleek design and smart marketing: "It can fit in your pocket".    If you love an Ipod, you are a special person.  My research showed that there are superior products at a cheaper price.  Ipod is just a marketing darling.

Nomad's sound quality rating made sense to me, since they have been making digital audio stuff a lot longer than Apple (ex. Soundblaster).

[John Kelly]

Better than the Ipod, because of price and sound quality.

How is the sound quality better?

Did a a lot of research on these 2 last year. A lot. Checked out all the comparisons that were done. Read all the experts reviews. Read a lot of consumer reviews. Jukebox consistently beat out those in its class for sonics. Ipod got the nod for sleek design and smart marketing: "It can fit in your pocket". If you love an Ipod, you are a special person. My research showed that there are superior products at a cheaper price. Ipod is just a marketing darling.

Nomad's sound quality rating made sense to me, since they have been making digital audio stuff a lot longer than Apple (ex. Soundblaster).

What I'm saying is what about it makes the sound quality better.  They're both playing compressed audio through a 1/8" output, it's not like you're going to hear a whole lot of difference between any of them.

Or is it just that the headphones that come with the zen are better?

[scb]

Better than the Ipod, because of price and sound quality.

How is the sound quality better?

Did a a lot of research on these 2 last year.  A lot.  Checked out all the comparisons that were done.  Read all the experts reviews.  Read a lot of consumer reviews.  Jukebox consistently beat out those in its class for sonics.  Ipod got the nod for sleek design and smart marketing: "It can fit in your pocket".    If you love an Ipod, you are a special person.  My research showed that there are superior products at a cheaper price.  Ipod is just a marketing darling.

Nomad's sound quality rating made sense to me, since they have been making digital audio stuff a lot longer than Apple (ex. Soundblaster).

But as we all know, soundblaster cards are the "low end" cards, so that's not a great argument... 

I've done research and listened to all sorts of products.  The iPod sounds fine to me.  I don't think I need to be a special person to think that. 

There are also plenty of reviews that will back up the claim that the iPod is not an inferior product.

[spyder9]

Opinions: 6 of one, half a dozen on the other.  You can argue it many different ways.  I guess you can say their all good.  Technology has improved so much on mp3 players in the last year, we could discuss this for eons.  Now, its case of what kind of fashion statement you want to make.  Do you want Nikes or Tommy Hilfigers?  They both are supposed to be comfortable to walk in.  Peace.    

[spyder9]

Oh yeah, I use Shure E2c for canalphones.  Killer phones!  May someday upgrade to E3cs, but these will do just fine for now.

[wbrisette]

Apple didn't lose market share to MS, they lost it to IBM back when big iron was king and the closed architecture didn't help.

Actually that's not entirely true. When Apple screwed up the licensing of certain thing to MS, then lost it's court case with MS, that's when it really saw huge shifts in marketshare. Windows 3.x wasn't going to win anybody over. Once MS won the case, it was pretty much free to legally steal as much as it wanted from Apple's interface designs without having to worry about Apple anymore. Windows 95 came out and well that's when huge marketshare shifts came into play.

IBM was busy at this time with OS/2.

The biggest losses in Apple's world over the past several years have been in K-12 education. Part of it is political with IT directors making it impossible for Apple to even bid on contracts (like our local school district), and part of it is Dell who offers schools deals on equipment it had out on lease but has been refurbished. Tough to compete against that model.

Apple now has to win on it's own merits and the iPod is one of the few ways it has been able to have people look at the platform again.

To bring this back on topic a bit more, it's going to be hard for Apple to do some of the things that Creative and others are doing. Not because they don't want to do them, but they had to do some backflips for the record companies in order to get them to license their catalogs to Apple. This means there are some things you just wont see on an iPod, and you know maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe we need to stop trying to make these things vegimatics and use them for what they were designed for; that playback. In that area, I find the iPod very acceptable, I use it in the car and at work. In both places I'm not going to hear the difference between most of the units on the market.

Wayne

[Karl]

I just listened to the mp3 posted way above--there are a couple notable concerns.  The recording is in mono.  Also, the waveform does not come above zero at all. 

There also seems to be some HD noise introduced into the recording, very similar to what we hear when we record analog into the JB3.