i know there's plenty of apple dudes out there who dig their ipods... and til recently, there woulda been NO way to convince me that using apple technology on my PCs would be a good thing. i have an inherent distrust of all things proprietary.. shit is just un-american.

BUT ANYHOW... my wife wanted an ipod touch a few years back.. we got it for her, and it sat in a desk drawer. for two years. so working an hour from home now, and working in the trades.. sometimes i start doing shopwork, and it's not bad to have an mp3 player-- and this things a 16 gig.. so i commondeered it. once i got over figuring out how to use itunes... i kinda dig the thing.. but y'know. the bass on the thing JUST sucks, the treble's kinda flat.. clarity.. :p

WELL.. i set about trying to fix that.

i bought one of these things:



i give you the fiio e5. i think they're 23 bux. i used it for a coupla years with another mp3 player (non-apple).. and it was meh. it's a cool critter-- it's the size of one of those teeny little ipod shuffles, has its own clip.. a bass boost circuit which actually sounds GOOD... (go figger).. and it's usb rechargable. okay.. so far, it's just a basic amplifier.

i got to reading about the ipod and WHY my ipod sounds kinda shitey- and found you can bypass the internal amp (wheels turning)... so i thought.. well.. i HAVE another amp.. so you buy this thing called a line out cable to accomplish said goal.. which basically fits in the din plug on the bottom of the doggone thing. i found a fiio one (the l9.. which is like 10 bucks). i didn't know if it'd make much difference or not... but it turned up this week.



result: whoa. damn thing sounds fantastic for less than 35 bucks. no more mushy bass splat. no more lack of definition and treble clarity, and i attach it all together with a rubber band and it STILL fits in by breast pocket.

been thinking of building a cmoy for shits and grins--- but that's later, cause right now, i'm driving my beyer 770's off my ipod, and they sound great, where before they'd BARELY get above speaking volume, and i still have headroom.

anybody else using headphone amps and turning up good results? i'm pretty shocked how good this biz is sounding... what a difference a good opamp makes even if it's 20 bucks.

No, but in my random pile of electronics I have a Lepai T-amp... 20 watts per channel class T strangeness. I use it as a speaker/CD player/phono (after a preamp)/name that audio device test bed amplifier. It cost me about $35 and it actually sounds pretty good. Not super amazing like my Kenwood KR-4010 but it's got a surprising amount of headroom and volume for the wattage rating.

intersting. I was not impressed with my daughter's iPod, but this might be a way to make it sound like something.

You know last year I was so discouraged with my iPod that I went and obtained a Cowon J3 MP3 player, which does sound pretty nifty. I would have totally scooped that up instead. That looks cool as hell. The first one looks exactly like one of those tiny stupid iPod things that people attach to their arms. I dig the one that hooks up to the ass end of the iPod.

Innerestin'...

I know using a Presonus HP4 with my Saffire versus the internal headphone amp is a big improvement. Better treble, better bass, wider soundstage and way, way more level on tap. (Hell, it sounded better slaved into my stereo and using the headphone out there.)

I've also been a bit uninspired by my ipod touch sound, it actually sounds worse than the only ipod mini I have. Sounds very dull, flat and weak. I might try something like this out but I dunno if I want to spend even more money on it and have more crap to carry around with me.

This is making me wonder how crappy the current generation's headphone amps are.

Oh, but for a cassette Walkman and cheap earbuds from the '90s.

I'd say there's a difference but I just realised that maybe the reason for that is I had my mini's eq set to flat, but I think I just have the EQ turned off on the touch. Not sure if that would make much of a difference but I'll try it and repoart back

oh god.. y'know-- for the most part, there's quite a few really rockin' op amps for headphone use-- and they're CHEAP.. i mean, like 3-5 bucks cheap. the problem is... when they're making 145 billion of these things.. they'll sweat the pennies... so they cheeze out.. and i mean, BIGTIME.

good thing is-- DIY stuff on 'em is pretty easy-- OR... you can get a fiio too for 20 bucks. look up CMOY headphone amp--- people build 'em into altoids tins with like 15 bucks worth of stuff... and they pull down like 300mv, and run on two 9v batteries for massive power reserves-- versus the really bad power supply and opamps that're in an ipod- and i think they max out at half that output... so of course they sound poop.

the ipod touch has an okay DAC, apparently- not super badass- it's a little grainy to my ears sometimes.. but meh.. it's not REALLY a listening device.. it's a convenience device.. at least putting an amp with some grunt on the back end minimizes the damage. i'd still rather run it all through a proper tube amp.. but it's a bitch jogging with all that iron.. not to mention the half mile of extension cord.

i was pretty seriously surprised, though, how much more clarity you could pull out of this thing though. at worst, it can be a bit etchy... but it's an mp3 player.. so expectation check, right?

I'd rather have a cassette than something ripped at 128. Eew. Something decent quality though is acceptable. Now, the thought strikes me- and Apple especially could get away with this... Your higher end expensive ones, they're aiming for the prestige brand angle, and they'll play lossless or uncompressed files. There's some decent quality headphones available at Apple stores. Put a better headphone amp in it and play that up- improved sound.

most of the music I listen to is 320kbps mp3 and I find it fine through my mackie monitors. If I had a proper hifi setup I may think otherwise.

y'know-- i've listened to 320kbps mp3's through a tube and horn system-- and hell if i can tell any difference between wavs and mp3's at high kbps. not for rock music, anyhow. if you're listening to really high resolution audio of classical music... you might hear a difference.. but i haven't been able to discern much for 90% of the music i listen to.

NOT so with 128kbps stuff on any system... it's actually pretty amazing how decent good rips can sound.

What I'm hearing lacking at 320k is really a fraction of a percent of detail, in the top end or "air" and what I like to call "the space between". I think the bass might be off a bit, but I mean really, it's damn close. 128k is horrid noise and digital aliasing; ruins cymbals and anything else with top end. Obvious audible artifacts. Think bad Youtube video.

Now, re: 320, I'm not some golden-ears audiophile asshole. I'm talking the barest details of details. Like, you'd actually have to be actively concentrating on the way a reverb tail decays to know. Which is a different sort of asshole altogether. Only the insane will know.

And to Mr. Todge- having monitored through my hi-fi for years- good speakers are good speakers, period full-stop done. I have an odd preference for things that are "just the facts, ma'am" and might not be horridly pleasant for others to listen through. But if it sounds good, it is good. Same as anything else, really. I'll relate again the story when I first got my Adams and of course I put on Dark Side Of The Moon, and my housemate comes in from watering her plants on the porch to say "those speakers sound amazing". The difference is only in do they tell you what you need to know vs. what you want to know.

never used one. I usually only listen during work, so the quality isn't that big of a deal. Drowning out air guns and idiots trying to talk to me is.

Changing the EQ to flat on the ipod touch doesn't seem to do anything. I think it actually sounds about ok for listening to stuff in the car, it's just shite for headphones. Considering getting the Equalizer app that gets good reviews on head-fi. Really not sure why apple never thought to put a custom EQ option on ipods. It's like they don't trust us to make it sound right, so just supply us with a load of shitty sounding presets instead

oh my god-- absolutely maddening.

the thing about it IS-- their EQ settings DO do okay stuff if you're not dumping that info into a terrible output stage-- which seems to be just the case. even in my car, it sounds a TON better with the different amp.

here's an interesting article on headphone impedance as well-- http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/hea ... dance.html

tech stuff-- but the long and short of it IS-- totally incompatible standards make for really shitty sound, only made worse by cheap cans-- and it's a moving target. look at the INSANE frequency response disasters inherent to mismatched loads...

i actually use the 'bass reducer' MOST of the time for my 12 ohm in-ears or it's murk city.

OH-- and WRT the equalizer plugin... i'd skip it. I got it, and it wasn't all that, honestly. it's a cumbersome interface for marginal benefits at best, and it doesn't really address the real problem IMO..

Can't load Waves API 550B or SSL G Channel on there? Damnation.