Originally Posted by The Monkey
Elias,
Thanks for taking the time to post in this thread. Welcome to Head-Fi and, er, sorry for what you do to our wallets.
Interesting point about working with the MS and Apple folks. How seriously do their engineers take their audio at the respective companies?
Monkey (if that is, in fact, your real name...),
MS and Apple folks take their audio very seriously. However, the beast that is called 'product developement' sometimes prevents a designer from optimizing every aspect of every function of their product. This can be for many reasons: cost, development time (time to market), stability, and intra-compatibility.
The latter (intra-compatibility) refers to something very common in computer hardware and software. That is, when a product performs such a wide array of functions as a computer does, the designers are often limited by other functions within the product. A quick and dirty example is: traffic build-up on a road may not be limited to how many lanes make up the road, but actually by an intersection with another road. Another example: the USB port is built to feed printers and audio devices!!
-Elias
ps. Monkey, I'm sorry about your wallet, but my 176,000 mile, 12-year old car can attest that it goes into the product, not our wallets
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