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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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In Reply to: Portable Audio Device for Classical Music posted by Thornhill on November 30, 2006 at 16:23:48:
...but I broke it a few years ago. However, I joined the dark side a few days ago and bought an 80GB iPod. I held out as long as I could, but that much storage capacity was more than I could resist. There are certain trade offs, but overall I consider the iPod a tremendous improvement as a portable music source.Yes, as Bob mentioned the 5th generation iPods have gapless playback. According to Red Wine Audio, the 4th gen players have better sonics, but gapless was important for me, primarily for live recordings.
As you probably kow, you cannot put music on an iPod without a computer. The optical S/PDIF input on the MD player was an excellent feature, but alas.
The battery seems to last quite a while (20 hours according to Apple, but I haven't tested that for myself yet). Also, there are aftermarket rechargeable battery modules that attach to the bottom of the unit, providing even greater hours.
Finally, yeah, the iPod has all kinds of bells and whistles, but that's not why I bought one. Considering the use I'll get out of it as a music player, it's not like I got ripped off paying for features I won't use much. (The folks in China who build these things, on the other hand, are getting ripped off by low wages. Color me guilty.)
I feel the only area where MD has any advantage these days is as an inexpensive portable recording device, but if you're only using it for playback, why bother with a bunch of disks that you *only* use in one player? 80GB is a lot of music, even when encoded in the Apple Lossless format (akin to FLAC). That's an awfully nice sized library of music to have at one's disposal. All of the jazz and classical music in my unit is Apple Lossless. The rest is 320kbps AAC and MP3, both of which sound better than my old Sony's ATRAC3 compression scheme. In fact, I'm amazed how good a high-bitrate MP3 file actually sounds. At 320kbps, blatant compression artifacts like ringing and buzzing are pretty much asbent.
As I expected, the iPod's built-in headphone amp is nothing to write home about. It can't drive my Etymotic SR-4S very well, but with the Headroom Airhead amp it still makes for a compact rig. On the other hand, it wasn't TOO bad with my Grado SR-125's. I'm considering the the Ray Samuels Hornet or the even smaller Tomahawk headphone amp for an smaller package, although neither have crossfeed circuits.
The bottom line is that I enjoyed my MD player while it lasted, but given the iPod, I don't miss it. I didn't want to admit it, but the iPod is an awfully slick device and has probably earned a significant place in the history of designed objects.
-Anthony
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Follow Ups
- I once used a Minidisc player for portable listening... - Bersani 20:32:03 11/30/06 (0)
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