What is the sound quality of iPhone, iPad, iPod (Touch)?

[proton007]

Quote:

Most people would say that the Clip Zip is just a budget alternative.
 
It may be that you liked the sound signature better? More fun, more colorful etc?
 
I never crticially listened to the Clip Zip or at all. I just played with the interface at Best Buy

 
Not colored, I found it clearer and had a better sound stage. Tried with the same earphones, same music. The instrument placement was much better than what I could achieve with the iPod Nano.
 
About it being budget oriented, I'm sure thats how its was intended to be. No one takes it seriously from the looks of it.
But it seems Sandisk hit gold here. Given the cheap earbuds they give with it, I'm sure they didn't think it sounded this well.

 

[bigshot]

Sound stage is in the recording, not the player.

 

[bowei006]

Quote:

Sound stage is in the recording, not the player.

The player could also have an adverse effect on soundstage. Of course, many things can. Be it software options you are using, the player, the headphone/IEM you are using, some say the cables, etc etc.

 

[bigshot]

It depends on what you mean by perfect. They do have a very high quality line out though. But of course I would still prefer a better DAC and other units.

The iPods have DACs that compare to good standalone home CD players. Every one of them has stone flat frequency response, no distortion to speak of, and a noise floor WAY below audibility. If you're hearing differences, you're eiher comparing the iPod to something that has inferior sound, or you're hearing placebo.

 

[bigshot]

The player could also have an adverse effect on soundstage.

Unless you're adding some sort of effect to the sound that is blending channels or splitting off to rear speakers, the soundstage is what it is. The only thing that could affect it is channel separation/crosstalk, and I haven't seen any home audio component since the LP era that had problems with that.

Soundstage is a function of miking and mixing. The only thing that can affect it in playback is room acoustics and speaker placement. Headphones have little or no soundstage. They simply have two separate and discrete channels that put the sound through the middle of your head across a single plane. Soundstage is by definition in front of you, not drilled through your noggin.

 

[bowei006]

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Unless you're adding some sort of effect to the sound that is blending channels or splitting off to rear speakers, the soundstage is what it is. The only thing that could affect it is channel separation/crosstalk, and I haven't seen any home audio component since the LP era that had problems with that.
Soundstage is a function of miking and mixing. The only thing that can affect it in playback is room acoustics and speaker placement. Headphones have little or no soundstage. They simply have two separate and discrete channels that put the sound through the middle of your head across a single plane. Soundstage is by definition in front of you, not drilled through your noggin.

I see. So the Apple Earbuds have the same soundstage as an HD800 with the same song playing because they aren't doing anything different than giving you sound that has been mixed and recorded.
 
Let me see how many will agree with that.
 
Quote:

The iPods have DACs that compare to good standalone home CD players. Every one of them has stone flat frequency response, no distortion to speak of, and a noise floor WAY below audibility. If you're hearing differences, you're eiher comparing the iPod to something that has inferior sound, or you're hearing placebo.

The word perfect is a still bit. Big

 

[joeyjojo]

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I see. So the Apple Earbuds have the same soundstage as an HD800 with the same song playing because they aren't doing anything different than giving you sound that has been mixed and recorded.
 
Let me see how many will agree with that.

 
The above is a point of view held by me, bigshot and a few others around here. Music is almost exclusively mixed and mastered for a set of stereo loudspeakers (see Dr Cheskys stuff for music for headphones). The physical separation of the speakers, the phase information, and the dispersion of each channel through your skull can give the illusion of precise positioning of instruments in the 3D space in front of the listener - the "sound stage".
 
For some reason the term has been appropriated by the head-fi community and applied to headphones. However as bigshot says, playing unaltered loudspeaker-mixed music through headphones results in no "stage", but rather a line through the ears ("headstage"). I think what people mean in this context is more synonymous with detail or instrument resolution, but who knows, head-fiers have some weird ideas.

 

[bigshot]

Apple earbuds add no soundstage to the music that isn't there in the recording. That's true of anything you shove in your ears. In order for there to be soundstage, there needs to be a distance between your ears and the transducers. A headphone transducer sits a half inch off your ear. It adds a tiny, insignificant amount of soundstage- barely audible if it's audible at all. A set of speakers that are 15 feet in front of you and are 8 feet apart present a lot of very clearly audible soundstage. The directionality of the drivers and design of the cabinets can enhance that even more by throwing the sound out into the room. The shape and acoustic properties of the room can affect it further.

Soundstage is a realistic spread of instruments laid out in front of you. You don't get that at all by shoving the drivers in your ears. All you get is a left right spread that goes straight through the middle of your skull.

Oh! One more thing.... Yes, all those people talking about the soundstage of their heaphones on HeadFi don't really know what the term means. They're using it to describe placebo.

 

[bowei006]

We are talking about completely different things here. I am talking about the headphone soundstage that is most commonly used on Head-Fi where the headphone and the tuning and effects of its drivers, casing and everything will produce a more realistic almost open air effect like you are there. Not the real soundstage that the speaker people generally use.

 

[bigshot]

"Open" is a function of whether headphones form a seal around your ears or not. It as nothing to do with soundstage. It has to do with sound pressure and environmental isolation.

 

[bowei006]

Quote:

"Open" is a function of whether headphones form a seal around your ears or not. It as nothing to do with soundstage. It has to do with sound pressure and environmental isolation.

And again, I was not referring to open and closed headphones but the word open in general to describe the sensation that a more soundstage prone headphone will produce as opposed to say Apple Earbuds

 

[audiophylactery]

Thanks for the reply bowiexxxx. But it is a much more foundational theory to my argument, and one you seemed to hedge by focusing on an analogous similarity i drew between iOS updates and a TV firmware update, as well as my preference for using non-apple approved apps.
 
Still doesn't explain the monumental shift in sound signatures afforded by my iPod following a mere iOS update developed back in 2009...same chip, same speakers, same songs...WAY different response signatures.
 
Here's why!
 
Digital Hardware doesnt take crap ONE without a programming language of SOME sort(drivers/codecs/software/etc...). It just sits there on the toilet, constipated, if you will. Furthurmore, crap-ified programming can turn the most advanced hardware, in any sector of the electronics market, into sluggishly unintuitive and generally undesirable pieces of junk. Believing that a first party App/program is better than any and all like third party Apps out of hand, and as whimsically as you did is, well, kind of ignorant. Basically means you think that the guys who CODED the Music App on the iPod know how to reproduce sound better on any medium with any equipment than anyone, ever. Dreadfully unenlightened. But i'm not going to dwell on it. I'll keep my 3rd party app and play my tunes the way I want. Keep myself deaf to criticism right?
 
Saying that the iPod's, or ANY system's digital processing of sound is perfect is also just plain wrong. Simply listening to Sound ITSELF is an analog experience. And i don't care WHAT the situation...given a transmitted signal of ANY type (video/audio/wtfever), and having to convert that signal/waveform in any capacity whatsoever between digital/analog, always yields distortion and/or loss of frequency response.
 
The ipod is still what i use day to day as well...and have been for well over a year now. And will continue to do so. It's not that i DON'T like Apple products. Rather, compared to most companies in related markets, i PREFER them. But i'm not about to worship them as gods, discount other developers' offerings or close my mind to progression and improvement from an external source. Thats the HEIGHT of stupidity. 

 

[bigshot]

"Soundstage prone" just means better overall sound, or it can be a vague term used to describe placebo. Headphones do not have soundstage. The people who describe heaphone soundstage at great length are usually the same ones who claim certain headphones are more "musical" or use terms like PRaT. They are making stuff up.

 

[bowei006]

Quote:

"Soundstage prone" just means better overall sound, or it can be a vague term used to describe placebo. Headphones do not have soundstage. The people who describe heaphone soundstage at great length are usually the same ones who claim certain headphones are more "musical" or use terms like PRaT. They are making stuff up.

Now we are back to the definition of soundstage. What it is to you or me is different. Basically like you said, different headphones depending on many factors of that headphones tuning, casing, distance of driver from ear and other things can basically make the song or track feel realistic up to the amount of "real" spacial soundstage the track or song actually has if we are just talking about close to realisitc soundstage(for example, Monster Inspiration has a very large spacial effect and thus makes it feel like the headphone felt soundstage is really big). 
 
That is definately a quality that headphones have. On how spatial they can make a recording sound. And as it is a quality and a quality that many want. We needed a word for it. And guess what word we used? Soundstage. There are many differnt interpretations of it. But as we are in a headphone forum and soundstage has been given the clear set implication of what I said above, we needen't go into speakers and their types of soundstage for the definitoin of the word. It'd be like debating whether X words origins came from Greece or Rome while on a forum that is talking about Roman politics. Its just out of nowhere 
 
 
@Audio dude
sorry, got some work to do, will try to reply later

 

[bigshot]

given a transmitted signal of ANY type (video/audio/wtfever), and having to convert that signal/waveform in any capacity whatsoever between digital/analog, always yields distortion and/or loss of frequency response.

The iPod has total harmonic distortion of .06%
The frequency response is 20Hz to 20 kHz +/- at most .5dB, usually much less

That is stone flat with inaudible levels of distortion no matter how golden ones' ears are.

If I had an iOS update that changed the sound of my iPod in an audible way, I would take my iPod to the Apple Store and tell them to put it back in spec for me. I don't have a Touch. I have classics and iPhones. My iPhones have never audibly changed. If they did, I would be hopping mad about it.

When I get a new iPhone or iPod, I set up a line level matched A/B comparison of the mobile device against my home CD player. I've never detected any difference.