bigshot
Headphoneus Supremus
Do you think you can actually hear something at -75dB?
Do you think you can actually hear something at -75dB?
I can definitely heard the difference in the noise floor between earlier and later ipods. It's not even close.
You would have to be listening pretty doggone loud, uncomfortably loud, for the difference between -75dB and -90dB even to get close to being audible. Are you using line out? Perhaps it's your amp you're hearing. If not, you may be damaging your hearing listening that loud.
The noise floor of the original iPod was over -100dB if I remember correctly.
For a 16 bit device? Unlikely. My Classic measures at -95 dB, which is still very respectable 16 bit performance.
A Weighting is good for about 3 dB improvement to an unweighted noise figure.
Originally Posted by Trenn /img/forum/go_quote.gif
The larger point I wanted to make was that there have been substantial measurable improvements to iPods over the years. Personally, for 2nd and 3rd order distortion, I can't hear anything lower than -45 dBc, and for 5th to 7th, I can't hear anything lower than -70 dBc. So, I'd suspect most can't hear the THD differences between first and latest ipod.
Originally Posted by Trenn /img/forum/go_quote.gif
From a noise perspective, the fact that I can put a 24-bit flac or other lossless format onto a modern iPod, while I couldn't on an older ipod, is important from a quality perspective. There's a very good picture at the website I linked above that shows the noise performance for an mp3 versus flac. Even on a modern ipod the difference is huge. It is 25 dB if the graph is to believed. So, consider a modern flac file that is well recorded, with a nominal at -25 dBFS and peaks to 0 dBFS. That file squeezed to a 16-bit file format would be crushed.
http://www.quantasylum.com/content/Portals/0/Blog/Files/1/23/Windows-Live-Writer-Apple-Ipod_8B2D-image_38.png
The noise floor of the original iPod was over -100dB if I remember correctly. If someone is actually hearing that clearly, they definitely have the volume turned up WAY too high.
Mountains out of molehills.