Quote:

Originally Posted by scuttle 

 

Guitar amps are a special case: you may want distortion as part of the sound, and you'll choose and adjust the appropriate amp. But a hi fi amp is the opposite - it's job is to recreate what the musician create rather than trying to make the Monkees sound the Velvet Underground or vice versa.

That's what I said.  Did you miss the rest of my post?

"There are a lot of tube headphone amps that sound superb, too, but I still would take solid state over them any day."

Yeah but guitar amps 'sound' that way because of the soft-clipping in tubes. In speaker/headphone amps there shouldn't be any clipping at normal levels.

It sounded like you put both in the same category, which they are not.

No, that's not what you said. These are two quite different statements - they don't disagree, but they have separate meanings.

Quote:

Originally Posted by xnor 

Yeah but guitar amps 'sound' that way because of the soft-clipping in tubes. In speaker/headphone amps there shouldn't be any clipping at normal levels.

 

It sounded like you put both in the same category, which they are not.

Ok, well it was inferred.  I choose solid state because I want accurate reproduction of the recording.

Quote:

Originally Posted by stv014 

Quote from your blog: "The conversion was done by Audacity."

 

There might be the problem. Audacity has a poor, buggy noise shaped dither that does not work correctly with stereo audio, and adds about -80 dBFS (A-weighted) noise. In fact, I even recognize the spectrum of the Audacity noise on your graph. So, the noise floor is most likely not the fault of the iPod, or MP3 compression (you should not use simple THD, noise, etc. measurements to evaluate perceptual coding anyway), but that of Audacity.

You are indeed correct. I first replicated the experiment shown on the website, heard the noise difference, and then turned off dithering and the noise went away. I have some old stuff ripped in flac. Now I'm wondering if that had dithering on or if the noise floor is because it's music from the 70's. 

PS. I sent them a mail too explaining why their graph probably shows a difference. Not sure if they care or not. 

Well what do you know? You think this will affect SQ thru the headphone out?

Apple releases iOS 6.1.4 for iPhone 5 with updated audio profile for speakerphone

Apple on Thursday issued a new software update for iPhone 5 owners, adding an updated audio profile for speakerphone. The minor update is now available for download and install.

It's the speakers output issue that some iPhones users experienced.  It has nothing to do with headphones out or music playback.