!VAR HAGENDOORN

An iPod At Last

So I finally got myself an iPod. I bought it primarily to be able to take my entire music collection with me to the studio. I got tired of carrying my cd's around and then wishing I had brought another one. However, as I found out the first day I showed off my new gadget to the dancers, having everything at hand merely postpones the moment of decision.

Years ago I bought a discman but the earplugs kept falling out of my ears. So I bought a normal set of headphones but I didn't like being isolated from the noises from outside, although occasionally the conversations of people sitting in my vicinity when I'm on a train or a plane can be annoying.

So that's more or less why I could never really be bothered to buy an iPod. Now that I have one I must say that it is more than a gadget, it is indispensable. I bought the AV-connector so I can connect the iPod to my amplifier and play music when I'm in my kitchen or wherever. It's also great to be able to add videos. The screen is small, but it's good enough for rehearsal excerpts.

I quickly discovered though that I'm spoiled when it comes to audio quality.

Some time ago Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead commented in an interview that [they] "had a few complaints that the MP3s of our last record wasn't encoded at a high enough rate. Some even suggested we should have used FLACs, but if you even know what one of those is, and have strong opinions on them, you're already lost to the world of high fidelity and have probably spent far too much money on your speaker-stands."

I'm afraid I'm one of those persons lost to the world of high fidelity, because, yes, I can hear a difference between mp3 at 192 kbps and cd when I play them side by side, alternately as a matter of fact, on my audio system and yes, I did spend too much money on my Dynaudio speaker stands. And yes, I know that some people don't like the Dynaudio sound, but I do, it's clean, pure and consistent.

I don't understand why people put up with 192 kbps files or lower. But it's interesting that people en masse adopt something of a lower quality, which is a regression, whereas with most technologies there is a progression of quality.

Talking of nice speakers, I wonder how these sound. The music in the video is Boards of Canada by the way.

By the way, my dancers don't understand how I manage to get around with my vintage mobile phone either, so I may have to get myself an iPhone as well.

Update: I've done some further tests and it really depends on the kind of music and the encoder. AAC at 320 kbps sounds great, even at full volume inside a theatre!