MP3

Andy, the Front Row software is very nice. Ripp some CD losslessly, feed the optical out into a good DAC,  and tell us how it compares then :)

We noticed a significant drop in CD player sales a few years ago and discovered that our customers were shifting to one sort of Mac or other for the home and much preferred the result to hi fi separates. They are part of a fully integrated system that anyone can install and configure without problem and iTunes plays up to 24/96.

At the time I wrote an article for Inside Hi Fi, the trade journal asking if hi fi retailers who'd kicked against CD for years were ready for what might be their nemesis, the computer. I still don't think they are or that they've realised the inroads that Apple have made into the home as a Media Centre.

The iMac is the choice of people who do more computing than TV'ing, the Mini which shares its screen with the TV is an inbetweeny and the Apple TV is a wonderful way to cover it all and not always have to have a computer on.

Just my thoughts based on customer feedback.

Ashley

I'm slowly coming round to the Mac way of thinking. Since I got my PS3 I hardly game on my PC at all and, lets be honest, 2 player is more fun around a TV than a PC monitor! I think I'll have to look into this mac malrkey....

I was not at all interested in MP3. As a hi-fi nut I wanted the convenience, but in a lossless format.  I have now saved ALL my cds to Apple Lossless and play them back from an external hard drive through my system via my Macbook and I notice absolutely no loss of quality apart from couple of enthusiast recordings and even then it is not great difference.  I have always been a fan of Macs for computing.  I am now a fan of them for music playback and guess what - I have even been converted to MP3 (or AAC which I find superior, although not as convenient because friends players lack it) for archiving old cassettes etc.

Recently there has been some sour grapes from those who envy the success of the iPod along the lines of 'Apple just looks pretty and costs more, the PC is better value'  I have never met anyone who, having changed to Mac, ever went back.  The whole system is just better.  Now Mr Jobs, about that 24/96 service for iTunes and a 100-hour battery life player with 250gb of solid state memory..........?  (We all have our dreams).

Me?  I would choose quality over convenience anyday.  

Thaiman said:

Me?  I would choose quality over convenience anyday.

Mmmm..

Well I too have on occasion connected my MP3 Player to my amp for convenience but the thing is it IS just laziness tbh..... Thaiman is right though quality should come first... everytime   : )

you would but not the majority of people.

gross numbers matter more then a select few these days, plus people expect quality for a much lower price, thus high-quality goods are non-sustainable in the long term without lower-quality goods.

you need the low end to pay for the high-end in 2008.

Alantigger said:

<p>

Well I too hav eon occasion connected my mp3 player to my amp for convenience but the thing is it IS just

laziness tbh......Thaiman is right though quality should come first...everytime :)<p>Well, I can see your point if you compare an mp3 player to your hifi cd-player....however, quality takes a leap when connecting your carefully ripped lossless files with the digital out to your dac of choice. This could also be plugged into your standard cd-player.

Hey, I noticed the <P> in my previous post not having the desired effect! Does that mean the forum has been updated and I can now edit my posts properly without being an ICT expert?

Paragraph formatting now working perfectly in blogs/news-  first step to it being solved all round (fingers crossed!)

I must say it's a bit of a cheek putting the computer that makes most of the music we buy and many of the TV programs and Movies in the MP3 category. For a start iTunes plays up to 24/96 which is more than a CD player can do, then there is the fact that it has a far better user interface than any of the fiercely expensive music servers from the hi fi companies that will undoubtedly get very different treatment, not to mention everything else it can do.

It's very important to realise that any computer is a digital source and noughts and ones are the same wherever they come from as long as the file is in a Lossless format. It's the DAC that makes the difference to sound quality and one of the best is the Edirol UA25 for about £150. The internal one in a Mac isn't bad either.

Ashley

Trefor Patten - macs do cost more and are not as versatile.

Not sour grapes, just a fact. Im yet to be convinced i can have anything from apple that i cant make my pc do, in conjunction sometimes with my tv.

ok, it may require an upgrade or 2 to do some things, but itll do 'em.

by the by ive been able to get paragraphs here but not in the forums for a while, i THINK (must rush off and check history to make sure im not talkin' nonsense again).

Back to the hi-fi thingy B&O do come to mind! We all need to get to that level really. Unfortunately none ofour dealers are quite up to that standard and no UK hi-fi company can afford a have of their own shops to control. Customer service is king, so very true.

Oh and the guy who said:

"computer is a digital source and noughts and ones are the same wherever they come from as long as the file is in a Lossless format"

Sorry to be blunt, but technically that is clap trap. So much of what we listen to when data is not quite transpoted correfctly is what is known as error correction! Even lossless compression suffers from this and much more so than an uncompressed file. Its good but never perfect.

It is really quite simple; As memory becomes cheaper and processing faster, who needs to compress??

Oh did anyone hear about Woolies dropping CDs?

Haider you're confusing a CD player with a computer. CD players read in real time and use forward error correction and interpolation to play. This means they guess or mute if they can't read, however a computer doesn't do this, it takes its time to get an accurate read and does what's called a checksum to make sure all the noughts and ones are present and correct before it will play. If they aren't it won't.

Lossless as the name implies is lossless, it's simply a more efficient way of storing the data. It is not compression.

Ashley

al7478, it depends what you mean by Macs being "more expensive". The main issue is they simply don't have any low-end offerings, so the "cost of entry" to the platform is high. But, on a spec. per pound basis, Macs actually are competitive with the PC mainstream, especially when a new model has just come out (Apple tend not to reduce their prices as models age, so they become worse value as time progresses, until their next update and they're suddenly very good value again).

On the laptop front you have to take into account their size and weight - you can get a PC laptop with roughly the same specs as a MacBook Pro for about half the price, but it will be almost twice as big (by volume), weigh almost 3 kg Vs. the MacBook Pro's 2.45 kg and have worse battery life.

On the desktop front the Mini and iMac are both very competitive with their direct equivalents on the PC side as hardly anyone makes direct equivalents. This is a double-edged sword though - Apple don't have a true consumer desktop and that's unfortunate - they've just got a laptop with no keyboard, screen or battery (the Mini), a laptop/desktop hybrid on-a-stick (the iMac) and a high-end workstation (the Mac Pro). On the desktop side it is definitely true that you can get much more "bang for your buck" from a PC.

On the versatility front, you are simply wrong. Now that they're using x86 processors, Macs can run Mac OS X, Linux and Windows all natively. Your PC can't do that and therefore the Mac can run many thousands more applications than your PC can.

I suppose that depends on if you are playing the file back in real time where it uses a codec which will employ error correction or if you are simply converting the file to another format. Anyway it matters little appart from perhapse internet streaming and broadcast as memory is no longer at a premium.

But really B&O are who we should aspire to in Hi-Fi circles if we are to offer the type of customer service that the Apple experince provides. We do need to appreciate that most of our customers are not geeks like us and do like things to work out of the box.

Yes Apple can teach the consumer electronics industry a thing or two about convenience, convergence and quality.

After my long serving Quad 66 pre-amp expired I  purchased a new Denon AVR-2808 amp. It does a lot of things right but the user interface and remote are very poorly designed, both are complicated to set-up and use.

Even the very basic and most used function are flawed.

Changing Volume - Volume indicator is in dBs, so when i turn the volume up the indicator, which is too small, goes down.

Changing source - Complicated by the remote not having a separate button for each source.

At least my old Quad pe-amp did the basics right.

It's the first AV amp I have used so I'm not sure how it compares to others but the set-up process was very tedious ( the auto set-up worked but sounded horrible, so had to do manually ) and the remote is practically useless. Now use a Logitech multifunction remote that is better to set-up and is better than the Denon's dedicated remote to use.

In contrast my Apple Mac, Apple TV and iPod where easy to set up, work flawlessly together and are a pleasure to use with the attention to detail only Apple seem to be able to achieve.

All my CD's are on the Apple Mac, in Apple lossless format,  with all my current CDs automatically synced to the Apple TV. and all works very well.

iTune has an option to switch on error correction when importing CDs so It's incorrect so say a computer doesn't do this, as commented on above.

As error correction is applied when reading the CD, lossless compression is used for storing and the Mac, and Apple TV, have digital outputs. I see no reason for any or can hear any loss of quality in this process. I'ts all down to the quality of the DACs  and what comes after them.

I live in India, and have family visting more family in the US (software engineers naturally :-). Through them, should I spend 350 USD, that's 15k Rupees, a not inconsiderable sum, getting home the Wadia Digital ITransport for my 160 GB iPod to link up to my stereo ( The amp has an aux in where I normally jack it and it sounds ok) or is there another way to get superior CD quality sound from the iPod into the stereo. I love almost all genres of music created by African Americans. Ashleyji mentioned a device called the Edirol UA25 which I am now googling.

Returning to the original question, no I don't think so. Apple offer some excellent , innovative products for sure and have offered us new ways to enjoy our music that I feel most audiophiles should embrace.

Service however, is non-existent and not in the least comparable with hifi companies such as quad, naim etc.

I am pleased Mr Clough had a pleasant experience purchasing his imac but should anything go wrong he will likely be some considerable time without the machine after he has lugged it to his nearest authorised apple reseller who may get round to looking at it. This can also be very expensive after the initial warranty.

By the way, this is not a criticism of Apple - service is reasonably in line with what you might expect from a global computer manufacturer. But the point is, the hifi industry generally has little to learn from them.

Appologies,  I knew it was a mistake to even get vaguely technical on here so i will halt and get back to the original point we seem to all agree on.

We are mking all efforts within our limited resources to meet the standards you all aspire to. Morpheus is coming! :-)

"Mistake to get even vaguely technical here" ! Haider bro,  this is definitely not our 'Tamiz' esp. vis-a-vis older gents. Or pehaps my subcontinental perspective is misplaced. Anyhow, maybe you could instead help me benefit from your knowledge and suggest the best value option to a Wadia iTransport for converting an apple lossless ipod classic song into amp-friendly cd quality input.

My fav cheep dac is the apogee duet and it runs only on macs

Apogee makes protools (digidesign) quality AD/DA so I don't know what more you Hi-Fi people could want.

Lossless format and a good dac!