Originally Posted by
elemein 
Alrighty. So I'm pretty newbie around here, but even though I'm a youngling of 15 year old, I absolutely refuse to be those minions at my school who have Beats or Skullcandies and think they're the best without having ANY open mind. So that's why I bought Sony Giiqs and now I'm on my Panasonic RP-DJS400 (and thinking of upgrading em soooon :) ), and also, with a Fiio E6 being shipped in the mail as we speak :)
Now, I'm sorta young and cant afford much, and even if I have a lot of money I dont think I'll ever get to the 1000$+ mark in this hobby for one setup, actually, I dont think I'll ever edge of 500$ as I'm a pretty active lad who likes to go outdoors, but also loves his music. ANYWAY
Onto the questions after the background;
Right now my music is coming out of my iPhone 3G, is this okay? I hear a lot of the people around the forum are using the Sansa Clip+, and while Im not dissing people who use it, I simply dont know. What difference does it make of what is storing the music? Please enlighment me :)
Yes, it's ok, Iphones are pretty decent :) The difference resides in the the section that converts the digital signal into an analog signal (DAC) and the section that amplifies this signal to feed your headphones (AMP).
What is the best filetype for music? Mp3? Wav? AAC? Etc. Most of my songs on my iPhone are MP3 unless I distinctly told iTunes to make an AAC version (which I do incase the MP3 doesn't sync over. Not because i know what it does.) Anyway, whats the best filetype of music for quality?
The consensus is that aac is slightly better than mp3, especially at low kbps ( < 192), with files above 220 kbps, the difference is much less significant and close enough to the original uncompressed file to be considered indistinguishable but the majority of people. Wav is the said uncompressed original file, it is also outdated and obsolete because of the creation of lossless formats, as their name indicate, they compress music with losing any quality, think of it as a playable zip file for music. The most used ones are FLAC and ALAC (Apple Lossless), the iDevices support the latter. A compression/decompression algorithm is called a codec.
Can someone explain kbps to me? That sounds to me more like a rate of data transfer rather than a measurement of the quality of your eargasm.
While the lossless codecs compress without losing quality (you may notice that they compress less than lossy codecs), the lossy codecs throw away some data when they compress, the algorithm ensures that what's thrown away are the least audible (and sometimes totally inaudible) parts. But the more you compress (lower bitrates/kbps) the more audible the thrown away data gets. Thus, high kbps / low compression files are of higher quality.
You should also be aware that once the data is thrown away due to a lossy compression, converting it to a higher bitrate is useless, it's like emptying half a bottle of orange juice and filling the half emptied bottle with water, you end up with diluted orange juice. As a general rule, converting lossily compressed files (mp3 or aac) is useless at best and harmful to sound quality most of the time.
Can someone please explain the main ideas between the differences between gold-tipped jacks, and copper-tipped jacks, and silver and all those coatings on the jacks? How about the neodynium magnet and all those other magnets that your headphone uses?
Jacks are typically gold covered to prevent corrosion of the base metal, there are no further use of gold, as far as I know copper tipped jacks don't exist.
Neodymium magnets produce a stronger magnetic field for the same mass compared to other magnets, it allows more compact magnets with the same magnetic field. However simply stating neodymium magnets in the spec sheet is simply advertising buzz, the shape of the magnet, how it is implemented also matter, simply telling you it uses neodymium magnets does not give you any significant information regarding sound quality.
Also. Whats a soundstage? I have a gyst of what it is, but I cant seem to throw it into words :S
Soundstage is a generic term we use to describe how realistic the spacialization is; for example, if a band is playing, do the players sound squished together in the middle, or are they just on the sides with a big whole in the middle, do they sound like they are playing in a small room when it was in fact recorded in a concert hall...
Finally, the playback gear you are using is only half of the equation, the other half is how well recorded the music was and how good the sound engineers were at retranscribing what they hear 'live' on CD.
Sorry for the enslew of questions, but would love if theyd get answered. Thanks!
