UHF No 70 (Net).indd - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

scarcely needs a n
introduction. There
used to be a million
portable music players out there.
Now there’s the iPod, with some
35% of the market (Apple is only
getting used to this), and…oh,
a few others you probably can’t
name.
Because we’re audiophiles
we don’t usually go around with
headphones welded to our ears.
Apple wasn’t thinking of us — or
you possibly — in coming up
with either the iPod or its now
famous music store. Like all
other online stores, Apple sells
music in compressed form. True,
it uses Dolby’s AAC (Advanced
Audio Codec) instead of MP3,
but a quick comparison confi rms
what we expected. Neither is
meant for music lovers.
Fortunately there’s more to
the iPod.
Unlike most such players, the
iPod is format agnostic.
For all it
cares you
c a n lo ad
it up with
your photos, your
address book or your
doctoral thesis. You can also load it with
uncompressed music, in either WAV
or AIFF formats, which are the audio
formats of Windows and Macintosh
respectively. What’s more, it has gotten
big! The top model now has a whop-
ping 40 gigabytes of space, with 60 Gb
rumored to be on the way. The average
CD contains about 600 Mb of data,
which means about 67 of them can be
loaded onto a 40 Gb iPod. Better yet, in
late April Apple announced a new lossless
codec, possibly based on the open source
FLAC format. That doubles the capacity
again. Not bad for a battery-operated
unit that weighs under 200 grams.
The software is as important as
the hardware, though. The iPod was
originally made to operate with iTunes,
a program that comes free with the Mac’s
OS X operating system. A Windows version
also exists, and can be downloaded
from the Apple Web site. Both work the
Listening Room Apple’s ubiquitous iPod
54 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
iPod:
a Poor
Man’s
Server?
same way. You import music from CD
to iTunes, organizing it among folders
as you see fi t. A preference window lets
you pick a compression method…or no
compression at all. You can then arrange
your music into playlists, and ask iTunes
to play the pieces you’ve chosen either in
sequence or randomly.
Note that this is enough to turn
your computer into a digital jukebox.
You don’t need to own an iPod
to use iTunes, though if you
do things get interesting. Each
time you plug the iPod into your
computer (with FireWire on a
Mac, FireWire or USB on a PC),
iTunes synchronizes the iPod
with your computer. Imagine
having 67 CDs in your pocket.
Imagine hearing them through
headphones, or (with the little
Griffi n FM transmitter) through
your car radio.
And now imagine this. Some
people are spending thousands
of dollars, or even tens of thousands,
on music servers that
can stock music from hundreds
of discs and produce them on
demand. Can the iPod serve
some 70 discs on demand…for
well under a thousand? The
answer is yes. What we set out to
discover is whether it can do that
with what an audiophile would
consider adequate quality.
The picture, by the way,
was supplied by Apple.
Our iPod had
been t h rough
the hands (and
perhaps the claws) of
several reviewers, of which
the National Post was the
latest, and was too scratched to
photograph.
For this test we loaded three selections
into iTunes running on a Macintosh
iBook:
1) Bist du bein mir, from The Little Notebook
of Anna Magdalena Bach (Analekta
FL 2 3064). Properly reproduced, this is
a fi ve-goosebumps recording.
2) Now the Green Blade Riseth (Proprius
PRCD9093), a delightful or hideous
choral recording, depending on what
you play it on.
3) The Master’s Plan from Doug
McLeod's blues recording Come to Find
(Audioquest AQCD1017).
We synchronized the iPod, and then
listened to the three selections through
our Linn Unidisk reference player,
before plugging in the iPod. The player
has a standard minijack, to which we
connected an adapter, and a pair of Atlas
Navigator All-Cu interconnects.