Ars Technica just published a salutary article on studio efforts to improve the sound quality of iTunes and other digital tracks.

http://arstechnica.c...he-ipod-age.ars

I'm glad there's good news about digital, for once. There are still many technical limitations, e.g., the iPhone still has much less storage space at 64GB than the iPod Classic at 160GB.

Each portable can only hold a small slice of a decent music library encoded at low compression or in lossless format – never mind high-resolution files.

There's also the tradeoff between battery life, device size and price. The HiFiMAN HM-602, for example, only has 8GB. You're really sacrificing capacity for quality there (and I don't particularly want to pick on HiFiMAN, because they sell to the audiophile community).

I'm still using a Sony Discman because it has the mix of battery life, portability, and sound quality that I'm looking for. I've got an iPod Shuffle 4G hooked up to Klipsch S4i to take everywhere, but there's always a compromise.

I can't afford and dislike digital music library software and hardware. It is rarely as convenient as promised and that is one of the reasons why people are returning to vinyl (beyond its realization as a hipster fad).

Edited February 23, 201214 yr by HiWire

Read the article seemed rife with fallacies

Hmm perhaps because the marketing slogan "input modified to produce less worse output from proprietary post processing" isn't as snappy as "Mastered for iTunes". Comments point out that if we could get the Studio masters, they couldn't sell us all the different versions, as we'd be free to down-rez/down sample as appropriate for our own needs. It's not as if they are fully exploiting / limited by 20-20Khz and 96dB as it is.

You might as well say Mastered for Yamaha NS10.

To the OP: Vinyl Convenient? if you call having to get up every 20 minutes or so to change sides convenient.

Or you could say screw apple and buy a player that actually has a microsd slot for expandable memory. You can get a 32 gig microsd card for 30-40 dollars on sale. I have 4 that I use with my clip+, which still isn't my entire collection but is everything I listen to regularly. Total cost of ~150 bucks.

I have access to basically my whole library on my iphone, via itunes match. (ok, it's only the first 25k-ish files). And I have an interface that makes sense, works reliably, and is included in the phone I'm carrying anyway. Sure, it's only at 256k for the majority of the files, but for on the go use, that seems reasonable. Itunes match is $25 a year.

To the OP: Vinyl Convenient? if you call having to get up every 20 minutes or so to change sides convenient.

I was going to rant about vinyl but then I thought I might hurt someone's feelings.

Who wants to be limited to just "your library"? Net connected players FTW.

^ Yah, that could be problematic with previous technologies

Edited February 23, 201214 yr by Grahame

Solid Gold. The hits keep coming.

...studio efforts to improve the sound quality of iTunes and other digital tracks.

Compression is compression. No amount of preconceived fixing can escape the inevitable shitstorm of being compressed. Unless it's already compressed up the ying yang.

e.g., the iPhone still has much less storage space at 64GB than the iPod Classic at 160GB.

When the world stops designing solely for Apple products, we can get back to growing better digital audio sound.

I found "...mastering engineers are doing their best to create digital masters that can pass through Apple's iTunes algorithms with minimal sonic corruption." a little scary myself.. but whatever makes them a buck.. I don't buy any of it anyway..

Ah, that's cool. As a programmer and general computer junkie, thinking that someone is trying to foil a coding algorithm makes me happy. I don't buy the "with minimal sonic corruption" to be realistic, but you never know.