Disbanding from the Herd (iPod, we had a good run...)

4:13am Sunday 31st of January, 2010

I've been an avid iPod user for a few years now. After owning a stream of el-cheapo MP3 players in high school (in envy of the iPod) I decided to put an end to my music liquidity woes by finally buying my first iPod Digital Audio Player (DAP) in 2006.

I bought in at a time when portable media players were either full of gimmicks like FM radios and voice recorders thrown in to hide the fact that the interface was thought out by an engineering geek and prohibited any sense of pleasure in its usability. There were really only the iRiver HDD players, of which I saw way too many of break down, the Creative ZenVision:M (great product!) and the Apple iPod Video (and the oft-neglected Toshibas).

Naturally, given the choice between having voice recording and gaining hipster-street-cred (which I later realised is really just an overinflated social currency) I went with the iPod, which eventually lead to form what some may argue is an obsession with audio.

iTunes seemed to be just as good as Windows Media Player and it did a great job at organising my music, and finally I had somewhere to keep all my music together (with an almost religious affliction to organisation - seriously, I think I have digital music management's answer to O.C.D.). I began using the ratings system, and much like Amazon.com quickly grew to become a mine of knowledge of what's hot and what's not, my library started to evolve with the constant injection of meta-data such as play counts, last played datestamps, ratings. And thanks to a clever Smart Playlist feature my iTunes library began to know my music tastes better than I did!

It was a great partnership I had formed with my music collection - I kept feeding it music (from store-bought CDs, as I do exclusively to this day) and it kept doing things like pointing out which artists I listened to the most, from which genres, and which styles (this was all pre-"Genius", so I had to do the actual legwork in finding similar acts).

In early 2008 I "upgraded" to a newly released iPod Touch. I liked the idea of an Digital Audio Player (DAP) being more than just an digital audio player - and I sure as heck wasn't going to give up the mass of accrued meta-data about my library from iTunes so I was strongarmed into going with Apple. Coupled with my $100 Sennheiser CX500s at the time I found it to be quite good, but I had to start compressing my music to get it to fit onto the 16GB it allowed (until then I exclusively used Apple lossless - commonly referred to as ALAC).

Then something strange happened - I began to notice a difference in sound from the two iPods. The iPod Video sounded fuller, the bass hit harder; it seemed a little 'cleaner'. I dismissed it at the time but it seems I was onto something. Many enthusiasts consider the iPod Video to be one of the best sounding DAPs ever released (albeit after some degree of hacking).

Fast forward to 2009 when I decided to buy the iPhone 3G and I never really bothered to consider the option of having a separate DAP - everything I needed was finally in a single device! After reading somewhere on the net that the iPhone 3G indeed has good sound quality (from someone who I would now assume is partly deaf and/or decidedly fleecy) I bought a pair of Ultimate Ears Super.Fi 5 (v2)s. They were a big improvement on the Sennheisers and ticked all the boxes in the sense of quality bass, crisp treble, clean mids, etc.

But alas, after turning a deaf ear to it for far too long, I'm reminded of a younger me bemoaning the problems with converging technologies - which in a nutshell is that while you may be able to do two things on one device, neither of them are executed as well as they before they were converged.

I've long since sold my iPod Video and my iPod Touch sits idly as an overpriced remote control so I really have little grounds for comparison in terms of audio quality. That is until I borrowed my dad's humble Samsung YP-T10 4GB DAP to test out the sound quality (he mentioned that he was looking for a nice pair of headphones so I thought I'd do the honour of making sure his source was up to scratch).

So I loaded up some of the tunes that I know sound good on my speaker system, plugged in my Ultimate Ears and eagerly fumbled through the (non-Apple, i.e. now alien-like) menus to find my music. I started with some Diana Krall, a studio rendition of Love me Like a Man which sounded fuller and clearer than I had ever heard it.

I think it was at this stage I was in a state of suppressed awe, and heavy denial. I tried some more tracks in the hope that it was some sort of fluke, only to finally realise exactly why me earphones cost me the better part of $300! Here was a $100 MP3 player pushing out my music more confidently, fuller, richer and cleaner than I've ever heard it before!

My illusions of an integrated solution for phone and DAP seemed to trickle away with each track I listened to. Heck I even found out why people listen to Kenny G! [From dad's music - some of the most faithfully recorded brass and woodwind I've ever heard.]

After a lot of researching I tried out the Zune software (version 4.2) on my PC and ordered a 120GB Zune off eBay. Sony's NX-1000 series is heralded as the DAP to beat for sound quality, but the Zune gets mentioned in comparison often enough to trust that it's close. It seems these days the best sounding DAPs are too engrossed in flash-based storage to have decent storage sizes (although I do know full-well that I don't need lossless for a media player - I just like the idea of finally having a single library for my hifi and DAP).

The Zune software has to be the best media management software I've ever used! Foobar2000 is great of bypassing the Windows-Audio and integrated motherboard sound voodoo that's done to the signal but its media management intuitiveness is scant. Opening up iTunes these days has me reaching for the coffee maker so that I have something to sip on between mouse clicks and regaining system responsiveness. But Zune's software is reminiscent of the smoothness of XBMC or Boxee - but with an interface that actually looks downright sexy!

I'll still be loading up my iPhone with tunes (Bluetooth streaming for the car is all-too-convenient) but I'll finally be able to go back to the days when I actually shut up and listened to music in wonder of its spectacle - rather than using it to block out background noise . I'll be looking to pair up the Zune with some freshly transcoded lossless WMAs and eventually some Westone True-fit 3 In-Ear Monitors (which I was actually about to purchase before listing to dad's Samsung and realising that I still haven’t heard the best of my current earphones).

Who knows, maybe next I'll downgrade my phone to something that actually answers calls without having to slide my finger across the screen and hoping it doesn't freeze for more than a second?