Lo there,
A long post this one but hopefully interesting for all you DAP users, or those thinking of getting one. It consists of mini review of the new Apple IPod Touch, and a blind test of the differences between some of the various popular portable music file formats.
I'll post pics this weekend when I get home.
1st of all, the IPod Touch review part.
Why did I go sell my soul to apple?
Well, I dropped my 2 year old 20GB Sony hard disc based player and smashed it, so I went looking for a new player. I've always used a Sony but unfortunately they no longer do hard disk based players, only flash memory at 8gig or so and I wanted a big capacity disk based player (or so I thought)
So, I went shopping to road test the various players. In the end, my choice seemingly came to either a Archos 605 Wifi or a Apple 80 / 160GB player. In testing, the Archos was discounted pretty much straight away as in my tests in the shop it would not do gapless playback which is a must for me.
That left the IPod 160GB.
After playing around with it, I was slightly under whelmed to be honest. It seemed to be unresponsive, sometimes the click wheel took 2 seconds to respond then when it did, it seemed what I would call jumpy navigating around. Other than a colour screen and bigger capacity, it was really about the same to use as my old Sony. It had the cover flow option of the Touch, but again it was very jumpy and not all that smooth. And it seemed heavy and bulky. I was getting ready to walk away.
Then they handed me the Touch.
After 2 minutes playing I was grinning. A superb piece of kit which really does redefine how these sort of things should be designed. After a gapless playback check, I bought it and headed home.
So why’s it so good?
First of all it's wafer thin, you could slip this thing under a door crack. It's also surprisingly heavy, but not as heavy as the big disc player IPods.
The front is mostly the 4 inch by 3 inch (480×320 pixels at 163 PPI) wide aspect touch screen. There's one circular button underneath that which is your home button. If you double tap it, it brings up the volume control and track control, allowing you to make changes without having to unlock the player completely.
On the bottom lays the dock port, and the headphone jack. On the very top there is one button which doubles as the screen off button, and if held down for several seconds, the power off button. I’ve heard a few people complain about the location of the headphone jack. Personally I think it’s in the right place. As you’ll tend to put the player in your pocket with the jack at the top, it means when you take it back out, it’s the right way up in your hand!
The front is finished in a black matt finish and the back is the silver metal finish. The screen is glass but it's toughened and scratch resistant. Build quality is very very nice IMHO, it seems solid and extremely well made.
Features out of the box are mainly that lovely touch screen, music player, video player, wireless connectivity, Itunes on phone, photo browser. It also does video out via component.
Power it up after it's been off, and it takes a full 20 seconds to boot and become usable which is quite a long time, (if it's just in standby though it responds instantly). The reason for the long cold start time is that it has to boot its Unix operating system. Yep it runs on Unix, and you can hack it too, more of that later.
On power on, you have various icons on the screen. At the very top there’s the time, and battery indicator. Under that are icons for safari (web browsing), UTube for direct link to video clips, settings for err settings, clock, calculator, calendar, and contacts. At the bottom lies the dock icons which consist of Music, Video, Photos, and ITunes. Everything is laid out in a nice uncluttered fashion.
The desktop is always in portrait mode in case you’re wondering!
To use it, you simply touch your finger on the screen at whatever you want to do. The sensitivity is absolutely spot on, as is the responsiveness. The first few minutes will be spent testily and lightly tapping the screen scared you break it. Then after a few minutes you get the hang of it and start discovering all the little niceties.
Touch the music icon down the bottom and it opens your list of music. You’ll see your music listed by Album complete with little pictures of their album covers. Put your finger on the screen and move it up and down to browse your collection. If you flick up or down, it scrolls at a faster rate. Simply tap on an album to open it and show the track listing, so easy and quick.
Flip the screen 90 degrees so the player is widescreen and suddenly things look very different.
If you’re browsing music you’ll now see your albums shown by their front cover like their sitting on a shelf on a glass shelf CD rack (they even have a reflection). Touching left or right brings up the next / previous album in a smooth flowing effect. You can flick and it moves past several albums in one go. Very nice and just so damned lovely to use!
Touch an album cover and it flicks over to the back showing the track listing, unfortunately it’s not a picture of the back cover which is a shame.
Browsing photos is the same. If the picture is portrait, hold the ipod in portrait and the pic fills the screen, but for a landscape simply tilt the device 90 degrees and it rotates the pic and makes it full screen. A left or right flick changes the photo to the next / previous one as with music.
Oh did I mention the pinch?
If you’re browsing your pictures, you can pinch the screen to zoom in or out. To zoom in you put 2 fingers on the screen and pull them apart,and to zoom out, you push the 2 fingers together. Very smart, and the logic is right now I've had time to think about it.
The above works with web browsing to, and on that subject…
Web browsing is by far the nicest and easiest to use of any hand held device I’ve ever tried. It’s smooth and quick and everything works. You can browse in either wide or short screen mode. You can zoom in on any part of the screen, zoom out, have multiple pages open, it plays embedded videos etc. Strangely enough, there’s no home button, and I can’t find a way to set my own homepage. When you want to type in an address, you have to do it on a virtual keyboard which can be a bit hit and miss until you get the hang of it, and even then it’s still easy to make mistakes.
Wireless access is handled brilliantly on it. It will remember your preferred networks and log in to them automatically if you want it to. If you leave wireless on, it will even tell you about new networks it finds and either log in automatically or ask you what you want to do. I’d recommend leaving wireless off unless you want it though as it does eat battery life.
Videos are also superbly handled and do look excellent on the screen. An average 1.5 hour film will come in at about 300MB or so of your precious space. They always play widescreen mode though, even if 4:3 so you will end up with black bars on older films.
There are other things like contacts, and you can use it as a simple personal organiser and schedule reminders etc. It has a speaker for this built in but, it's not all that great and you can't play music through it. It does work for alarms etc though.
Battery life is quoted at 22 hours music playback, 4 hours video. I've only charged it once so that sounds about right. Wirelesss being on does drain the battery though.
But how does it sound, after all it’s a bloody music player and this is a HIFI website!
I’d read a few horror stories online after buying the Apple about it not sounding as good as other players, so I was bricking my pants. Had I jumped in to bed with a shit shag on the basis of its lovely features and looks?
I’m happy to report that thankfully, it sounds as good as it looks.
I put it up against my Sony using the same set of headphones (Etymotic ER4 P’S) on both players. A lossless track was the test. The IPod had more space around the instruments and soundstage (yes you can get it a DAP), it wasn’t as bloated or farty down in the bass department either and sounded like it had more of a flatter response, it just sounded more natural.
To be honest I was surprised at just how bad the Sony sounded compared to the IPod. In the week I’ve had the new DAP, I’ve heard things in my music that I have never heard either on the Sony or even on my home HIFI (Dynaudio, Lyngdorf, Unison Research). I’m stunned in that respect. And no I’m not playing all my music lossless now either.
Unfortunately, not everything about this thing is good though.
Bad things include the fact that it only comes in 8Gb or 16GB versions (even if it is flash memory rather than disc), and it’s very expensive for that size player. Also, some of the features like web browsing, ITunes etc, are only any good if you have a wireless internet connection.
Other bad things which I've found after use is that…
1: screen and front attracts finger marks and smudges like no ones business, and the silver back scratches very easily. A protector for the back is a must.
2: You have to use ITunes to put your music on the player, (I do quite like the program). The problem is that it’s very easy if you’re not careful to wipe the music you have already put on the player.
Delete the music from ITunes, then sync ITunes to IPod! It will wipe any music from your player that is not in your PC library which is a pain.
Personally I don’t want to keep 16GB of music on my PC all the time. The solution is to turn auto sync off and manually move your music over to the player by simply dragging it once you rip it. You’re then safe to delete the music from your PC if you wish.
You can still sync your photos, contacts, play lists etc automatically with no problem.
2.1: Oh and syncing photos while I think of it. if you have a folder with 2 gigis worth of pics. Don't sync it, asItunes will copy all the pics over to the pod. Best to create a seperate folder and put a copy of the photos you want on your player in there, then sync that. Unfortunately, you cannot drag / drop pictures in Itunes which is a huge oversight.
.
3: There’s no external volume controls which is a pain. It means having to take the player out of your pocket to lower or raise the volume. This could be an issue if you’re walking around a particularly dodgy area.
4: You don’t get a charger in the box only a USB lead (it will charge via that), so a charger is going to set you back 20 quid on top. And the bulk of the instructions are in pdf format on the Apple web site. You would think for £269 (16GB version), they could include some proper bloody manuals.
5: Out of the box, there's no way to play Internet radio on it as real player and windows media formats which most stations use are not supported. If you jailbreak though there's a 3rd party free app which will do this in a limited way for you.
6: Flash is not supported in the web browser which is a big oversite. And some embeded videos won't play. Anything quicktime is fine, but some others like windows media videos won't play. They will play in the Utube application though.
And finally, it’s volume limited. To get rid of the limit, you have to perform a hack known as jailbreak so you can get to the operating system and replace or edit the file which controls the max volume.
This involves downgrading your IPod software to 1.1. Then, visiting a website on your Ipod which will crash it then install some files (this is the actual jailbreak). You then get a couple of new icons on Ipod desktop. You use one of them to install another piece of software, then upgrade your IPod using ITunes to the new 1.2 software, and finally (phew) you run a file on your PC to jailbreak it again.
It sounds risky, and complicated but it’s actually very easy and safe to do and brings all sorts of other extra features. It’s also a piece of lady wee to restore to factory defaults using 1 click in ITunes.
Once you have jailbroken your ipod you can install all sorts of 3rd party applications on it like the Iphone email application, etch a sketch (and yes you shake the pod to erase your sketch), a application to install new icons, desktop wall paper etc. There are tons and tons of stuff for it. Your Ipod turns in to a fully fledged PDA.
I’m personally looking forward to using Iwoman which tracks your other halfs time of month. At least I’ll know when it’s safe to go to the pub after work, and when I’m likely to get something thrown at me if I do.
One thing while I remember which is a slight funny is the wallpaper function. You can choose which pic you want as wallpaper. However, it only displays it on the unlock screen when you have locked your player. It won’t display it as your desktop wallpaper. There’s a 3rd party app to solve that though if you decide to jailbreak your player.
Other than those few grumbles though, It really does from a usability point of view stamp on every other player out there, it also sounds fantastic. Just the price, limited space and those few niggles let it down slightly. But make no mistake this is how most of you’re music players and phones will be in the future.
I’ll give it 4.5 out of 5 using my top secret ultra unique rating. (it would have been 5 but the bastards won’t send me a free one in reward for a gushing review).
Now the blind test of the different formats part.
I'd always used Attrac 256k on the old Sony, but because the Apple won't support Attrac I was going to end up having to rip my library again (groan, what a pain). So I decided to try testing the different bit rates to find the best compromise of space / quality.
I ripped as the following popular formats using ITunes. No VBR or anything like that, I wanted to rip using the standard settings. Pretty much like your average person would.
Mp3: 128k, 160k, 256k, 320k
Apple format: 128k, 160k, 256k, 320k
Apple lossless: no bit rates to choose from as it is lossless
WAV: a direct rip from the CD.
The test CD was Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon, an album I know very well.
The listening test was about as blind as I could manage in the circumstances and was done as follows.
I imported the CD in to ITunes, one copy of the CD for each bit rate. In ITunes, everything was stored under one album, but the tracks were stored in such a way that I had all the copies of track 1 in format / bit rate order, followed by track 2 in format / bit rate order etc etc. All the music was then copied over to the IPod and thankfully, it stayed in the same order on there.
I setup a spreadsheet so that the tracks and copies were listed on it just like they were on the player, then printed 2 copies out. It looked something like this.
Track 1 - Copy 1 - mp3 128k
Track 1 - Copy 2 – mp3 160k
Track 1 - Copy 3 - Apple format 128k
Track 1 – Copy 4 – Apple format 160k
Track 2 – Copy 1 – mp3 128k
Track 2 –Copy 2 – etc etc
I put my headphones on, and handed the IPod and 1 of the spreadsheets to my other half. I kept the other spreadsheet.
I sat with my back to her so I couldn’t so what she doing. Then, she then picked a random copy of a track and played it, putting the number 1 against which track / bit rate she had picked. I then tried to guess what it was and marked it on my sheet. I then signalled her to pick another bit rate / format copy of the same track and she did and marked that number 2 on her sheet. This process repeated itself until all copies of that track were played.
One thing to note though!
She did not just go from lowest bit rate to highest. She did pick them in random order. And at no point until I’d decided I had enough of testing did I see her sheet or what order she had picked. The comparison was only done afterwards.
Setting all this up and doing it took a whole evening, but the results well…
1: The difference in bit rates was actually quite easy to pick out at lower and middle rates but I was surprised to find I struggled at the top bit rates and lossless
2: At 128k and 160k I could not tell which format was apple and which was mp3, and when I got them, right, it was just down to luck. Both formats sounded as crap as each other.
3: Above that up until 256k I could tell which format was apple / mp3 as the apple format did sound slightly better.
4: Of the 2 lossless formats I could not tell them apart they both sounded exactly the same. Only once did I get the lossless and wav files correct which again was just luck.
5: At points where she picked either low bit rate followed by lossless or vice versa, the difference was staggeringly clear and made me realise why I’d rather 1000 songs at good quality than 10,000 at low.
6: On two tracks she picked a lossless followed by a 320k format and I got them wrong!
7: Whenever 256k / losless was picked back to back,I got most right but not all. There seemed to be a slightly more airy sound to the lossless.This might have been my imagination though, and I could only tell (imagine) this on quieter trackslike Us & Them.It wasalmost impossibleto tell on the rockier tracks as I did get some wrong on tracks like Money.
I was quite surprised by the results as I had honestly expected to get every one right with the exception of the lossless formats. I was genuinely surprised to find I got a couple of the lossless and higher bit rate tracks the wrong way around.
What did this test tell me?
First it really did demonstrate that either my ears are not as good as I thought they were, or that Apple done a good job with their own encoder. Due to the fact that I had trouble telling the top bit rates apart, I chose to go with Apple 256k as my choice of music format for my new player. The savings on space from the highest bit rates and lossless also made it a very good choice. I did choose apple format though as I thought it sounded slightly better than mp3 at the higher bit rates. YMMV though.
I’m also surprised that so many people can put up with listening to music at low bit rates as it really does sound so bloody shit. Then again, I used headphones costing £220 for this test which will show up the differences. Maybe if I used the apple ibud things the results would be different?
Thanks for spending all night reading through this, I enjoyed writing it.
Dave
A long post this one but hopefully interesting for all you DAP users, or those thinking of getting one. It consists of mini review of the new Apple IPod Touch, and a blind test of the differences between some of the various popular portable music file formats.
I'll post pics this weekend when I get home.
1st of all, the IPod Touch review part.
Why did I go sell my soul to apple?
Well, I dropped my 2 year old 20GB Sony hard disc based player and smashed it, so I went looking for a new player. I've always used a Sony but unfortunately they no longer do hard disk based players, only flash memory at 8gig or so and I wanted a big capacity disk based player (or so I thought)
So, I went shopping to road test the various players. In the end, my choice seemingly came to either a Archos 605 Wifi or a Apple 80 / 160GB player. In testing, the Archos was discounted pretty much straight away as in my tests in the shop it would not do gapless playback which is a must for me.
That left the IPod 160GB.
After playing around with it, I was slightly under whelmed to be honest. It seemed to be unresponsive, sometimes the click wheel took 2 seconds to respond then when it did, it seemed what I would call jumpy navigating around. Other than a colour screen and bigger capacity, it was really about the same to use as my old Sony. It had the cover flow option of the Touch, but again it was very jumpy and not all that smooth. And it seemed heavy and bulky. I was getting ready to walk away.
Then they handed me the Touch.
After 2 minutes playing I was grinning. A superb piece of kit which really does redefine how these sort of things should be designed. After a gapless playback check, I bought it and headed home.
So why’s it so good?
First of all it's wafer thin, you could slip this thing under a door crack. It's also surprisingly heavy, but not as heavy as the big disc player IPods.
The front is mostly the 4 inch by 3 inch (480×320 pixels at 163 PPI) wide aspect touch screen. There's one circular button underneath that which is your home button. If you double tap it, it brings up the volume control and track control, allowing you to make changes without having to unlock the player completely.
On the bottom lays the dock port, and the headphone jack. On the very top there is one button which doubles as the screen off button, and if held down for several seconds, the power off button. I’ve heard a few people complain about the location of the headphone jack. Personally I think it’s in the right place. As you’ll tend to put the player in your pocket with the jack at the top, it means when you take it back out, it’s the right way up in your hand!
The front is finished in a black matt finish and the back is the silver metal finish. The screen is glass but it's toughened and scratch resistant. Build quality is very very nice IMHO, it seems solid and extremely well made.
Features out of the box are mainly that lovely touch screen, music player, video player, wireless connectivity, Itunes on phone, photo browser. It also does video out via component.
Power it up after it's been off, and it takes a full 20 seconds to boot and become usable which is quite a long time, (if it's just in standby though it responds instantly). The reason for the long cold start time is that it has to boot its Unix operating system. Yep it runs on Unix, and you can hack it too, more of that later.
On power on, you have various icons on the screen. At the very top there’s the time, and battery indicator. Under that are icons for safari (web browsing), UTube for direct link to video clips, settings for err settings, clock, calculator, calendar, and contacts. At the bottom lies the dock icons which consist of Music, Video, Photos, and ITunes. Everything is laid out in a nice uncluttered fashion.
The desktop is always in portrait mode in case you’re wondering!
To use it, you simply touch your finger on the screen at whatever you want to do. The sensitivity is absolutely spot on, as is the responsiveness. The first few minutes will be spent testily and lightly tapping the screen scared you break it. Then after a few minutes you get the hang of it and start discovering all the little niceties.
Touch the music icon down the bottom and it opens your list of music. You’ll see your music listed by Album complete with little pictures of their album covers. Put your finger on the screen and move it up and down to browse your collection. If you flick up or down, it scrolls at a faster rate. Simply tap on an album to open it and show the track listing, so easy and quick.
Flip the screen 90 degrees so the player is widescreen and suddenly things look very different.
If you’re browsing music you’ll now see your albums shown by their front cover like their sitting on a shelf on a glass shelf CD rack (they even have a reflection). Touching left or right brings up the next / previous album in a smooth flowing effect. You can flick and it moves past several albums in one go. Very nice and just so damned lovely to use!
Touch an album cover and it flicks over to the back showing the track listing, unfortunately it’s not a picture of the back cover which is a shame.
Browsing photos is the same. If the picture is portrait, hold the ipod in portrait and the pic fills the screen, but for a landscape simply tilt the device 90 degrees and it rotates the pic and makes it full screen. A left or right flick changes the photo to the next / previous one as with music.
Oh did I mention the pinch?
If you’re browsing your pictures, you can pinch the screen to zoom in or out. To zoom in you put 2 fingers on the screen and pull them apart,and to zoom out, you push the 2 fingers together. Very smart, and the logic is right now I've had time to think about it.
The above works with web browsing to, and on that subject…
Web browsing is by far the nicest and easiest to use of any hand held device I’ve ever tried. It’s smooth and quick and everything works. You can browse in either wide or short screen mode. You can zoom in on any part of the screen, zoom out, have multiple pages open, it plays embedded videos etc. Strangely enough, there’s no home button, and I can’t find a way to set my own homepage. When you want to type in an address, you have to do it on a virtual keyboard which can be a bit hit and miss until you get the hang of it, and even then it’s still easy to make mistakes.
Wireless access is handled brilliantly on it. It will remember your preferred networks and log in to them automatically if you want it to. If you leave wireless on, it will even tell you about new networks it finds and either log in automatically or ask you what you want to do. I’d recommend leaving wireless off unless you want it though as it does eat battery life.
Videos are also superbly handled and do look excellent on the screen. An average 1.5 hour film will come in at about 300MB or so of your precious space. They always play widescreen mode though, even if 4:3 so you will end up with black bars on older films.
There are other things like contacts, and you can use it as a simple personal organiser and schedule reminders etc. It has a speaker for this built in but, it's not all that great and you can't play music through it. It does work for alarms etc though.
Battery life is quoted at 22 hours music playback, 4 hours video. I've only charged it once so that sounds about right. Wirelesss being on does drain the battery though.
But how does it sound, after all it’s a bloody music player and this is a HIFI website!
I’d read a few horror stories online after buying the Apple about it not sounding as good as other players, so I was bricking my pants. Had I jumped in to bed with a shit shag on the basis of its lovely features and looks?
I’m happy to report that thankfully, it sounds as good as it looks.
I put it up against my Sony using the same set of headphones (Etymotic ER4 P’S) on both players. A lossless track was the test. The IPod had more space around the instruments and soundstage (yes you can get it a DAP), it wasn’t as bloated or farty down in the bass department either and sounded like it had more of a flatter response, it just sounded more natural.
To be honest I was surprised at just how bad the Sony sounded compared to the IPod. In the week I’ve had the new DAP, I’ve heard things in my music that I have never heard either on the Sony or even on my home HIFI (Dynaudio, Lyngdorf, Unison Research). I’m stunned in that respect. And no I’m not playing all my music lossless now either.
Unfortunately, not everything about this thing is good though.
Bad things include the fact that it only comes in 8Gb or 16GB versions (even if it is flash memory rather than disc), and it’s very expensive for that size player. Also, some of the features like web browsing, ITunes etc, are only any good if you have a wireless internet connection.
Other bad things which I've found after use is that…
1: screen and front attracts finger marks and smudges like no ones business, and the silver back scratches very easily. A protector for the back is a must.
2: You have to use ITunes to put your music on the player, (I do quite like the program). The problem is that it’s very easy if you’re not careful to wipe the music you have already put on the player.
Delete the music from ITunes, then sync ITunes to IPod! It will wipe any music from your player that is not in your PC library which is a pain.
Personally I don’t want to keep 16GB of music on my PC all the time. The solution is to turn auto sync off and manually move your music over to the player by simply dragging it once you rip it. You’re then safe to delete the music from your PC if you wish.
You can still sync your photos, contacts, play lists etc automatically with no problem.
2.1: Oh and syncing photos while I think of it. if you have a folder with 2 gigis worth of pics. Don't sync it, asItunes will copy all the pics over to the pod. Best to create a seperate folder and put a copy of the photos you want on your player in there, then sync that. Unfortunately, you cannot drag / drop pictures in Itunes which is a huge oversight.
.
3: There’s no external volume controls which is a pain. It means having to take the player out of your pocket to lower or raise the volume. This could be an issue if you’re walking around a particularly dodgy area.
4: You don’t get a charger in the box only a USB lead (it will charge via that), so a charger is going to set you back 20 quid on top. And the bulk of the instructions are in pdf format on the Apple web site. You would think for £269 (16GB version), they could include some proper bloody manuals.
5: Out of the box, there's no way to play Internet radio on it as real player and windows media formats which most stations use are not supported. If you jailbreak though there's a 3rd party free app which will do this in a limited way for you.
6: Flash is not supported in the web browser which is a big oversite. And some embeded videos won't play. Anything quicktime is fine, but some others like windows media videos won't play. They will play in the Utube application though.
And finally, it’s volume limited. To get rid of the limit, you have to perform a hack known as jailbreak so you can get to the operating system and replace or edit the file which controls the max volume.
This involves downgrading your IPod software to 1.1. Then, visiting a website on your Ipod which will crash it then install some files (this is the actual jailbreak). You then get a couple of new icons on Ipod desktop. You use one of them to install another piece of software, then upgrade your IPod using ITunes to the new 1.2 software, and finally (phew) you run a file on your PC to jailbreak it again.
It sounds risky, and complicated but it’s actually very easy and safe to do and brings all sorts of other extra features. It’s also a piece of lady wee to restore to factory defaults using 1 click in ITunes.
Once you have jailbroken your ipod you can install all sorts of 3rd party applications on it like the Iphone email application, etch a sketch (and yes you shake the pod to erase your sketch), a application to install new icons, desktop wall paper etc. There are tons and tons of stuff for it. Your Ipod turns in to a fully fledged PDA.
I’m personally looking forward to using Iwoman which tracks your other halfs time of month. At least I’ll know when it’s safe to go to the pub after work, and when I’m likely to get something thrown at me if I do.
One thing while I remember which is a slight funny is the wallpaper function. You can choose which pic you want as wallpaper. However, it only displays it on the unlock screen when you have locked your player. It won’t display it as your desktop wallpaper. There’s a 3rd party app to solve that though if you decide to jailbreak your player.
Other than those few grumbles though, It really does from a usability point of view stamp on every other player out there, it also sounds fantastic. Just the price, limited space and those few niggles let it down slightly. But make no mistake this is how most of you’re music players and phones will be in the future.
I’ll give it 4.5 out of 5 using my top secret ultra unique rating. (it would have been 5 but the bastards won’t send me a free one in reward for a gushing review).
Now the blind test of the different formats part.
I'd always used Attrac 256k on the old Sony, but because the Apple won't support Attrac I was going to end up having to rip my library again (groan, what a pain). So I decided to try testing the different bit rates to find the best compromise of space / quality.
I ripped as the following popular formats using ITunes. No VBR or anything like that, I wanted to rip using the standard settings. Pretty much like your average person would.
Mp3: 128k, 160k, 256k, 320k
Apple format: 128k, 160k, 256k, 320k
Apple lossless: no bit rates to choose from as it is lossless
WAV: a direct rip from the CD.
The test CD was Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon, an album I know very well.
The listening test was about as blind as I could manage in the circumstances and was done as follows.
I imported the CD in to ITunes, one copy of the CD for each bit rate. In ITunes, everything was stored under one album, but the tracks were stored in such a way that I had all the copies of track 1 in format / bit rate order, followed by track 2 in format / bit rate order etc etc. All the music was then copied over to the IPod and thankfully, it stayed in the same order on there.
I setup a spreadsheet so that the tracks and copies were listed on it just like they were on the player, then printed 2 copies out. It looked something like this.
Track 1 - Copy 1 - mp3 128k
Track 1 - Copy 2 – mp3 160k
Track 1 - Copy 3 - Apple format 128k
Track 1 – Copy 4 – Apple format 160k
Track 2 – Copy 1 – mp3 128k
Track 2 –Copy 2 – etc etc
I put my headphones on, and handed the IPod and 1 of the spreadsheets to my other half. I kept the other spreadsheet.
I sat with my back to her so I couldn’t so what she doing. Then, she then picked a random copy of a track and played it, putting the number 1 against which track / bit rate she had picked. I then tried to guess what it was and marked it on my sheet. I then signalled her to pick another bit rate / format copy of the same track and she did and marked that number 2 on her sheet. This process repeated itself until all copies of that track were played.
One thing to note though!
She did not just go from lowest bit rate to highest. She did pick them in random order. And at no point until I’d decided I had enough of testing did I see her sheet or what order she had picked. The comparison was only done afterwards.
Setting all this up and doing it took a whole evening, but the results well…
1: The difference in bit rates was actually quite easy to pick out at lower and middle rates but I was surprised to find I struggled at the top bit rates and lossless
2: At 128k and 160k I could not tell which format was apple and which was mp3, and when I got them, right, it was just down to luck. Both formats sounded as crap as each other.
3: Above that up until 256k I could tell which format was apple / mp3 as the apple format did sound slightly better.
4: Of the 2 lossless formats I could not tell them apart they both sounded exactly the same. Only once did I get the lossless and wav files correct which again was just luck.
5: At points where she picked either low bit rate followed by lossless or vice versa, the difference was staggeringly clear and made me realise why I’d rather 1000 songs at good quality than 10,000 at low.
6: On two tracks she picked a lossless followed by a 320k format and I got them wrong!
7: Whenever 256k / losless was picked back to back,I got most right but not all. There seemed to be a slightly more airy sound to the lossless.This might have been my imagination though, and I could only tell (imagine) this on quieter trackslike Us & Them.It wasalmost impossibleto tell on the rockier tracks as I did get some wrong on tracks like Money.
I was quite surprised by the results as I had honestly expected to get every one right with the exception of the lossless formats. I was genuinely surprised to find I got a couple of the lossless and higher bit rate tracks the wrong way around.
What did this test tell me?
First it really did demonstrate that either my ears are not as good as I thought they were, or that Apple done a good job with their own encoder. Due to the fact that I had trouble telling the top bit rates apart, I chose to go with Apple 256k as my choice of music format for my new player. The savings on space from the highest bit rates and lossless also made it a very good choice. I did choose apple format though as I thought it sounded slightly better than mp3 at the higher bit rates. YMMV though.
I’m also surprised that so many people can put up with listening to music at low bit rates as it really does sound so bloody shit. Then again, I used headphones costing £220 for this test which will show up the differences. Maybe if I used the apple ibud things the results would be different?
Thanks for spending all night reading through this, I enjoyed writing it.
Dave