First Look: Apple Lossless Audio, Apple Options

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First Look: Apple Lossless Audio

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I may be out of place here, because you guys are some true audio nuts. I recently ran a comparison of my own. I ripped The Flaming Lips' "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" in Apple lossless, and the good ol' standby, 192kb MP3. I chose this album for it's clarity, frequency range, stereo effects (there are many), and it's awesomeness. Not very scientific, this measure of awesomeness, and maybe not even a word, but whatever

The lossless version weighed in at 325mb, while the MP3 version came in at 65.2mb. I loaded both versions on a 4G 40gb iPod and did a track by track comparison. I even shuffled them a bit to throw me off. I did this using a set of Sony EX71SL buds, and then tried again with a pair of Sony MDR-CD160 headphones. Neither of these are audiophile quality headphones, but I think you will all agree they are worlds better than the earphones the iPod comes with.

There was a definately a differance. Though I doubt I would be able to tell the differance in 90% of the situations where I am using my iPod.

I can't really see myself using this too much. The file sizes are black death on the iPod's battery life. As for archival on some sort of hard disk library, i'd rather store them at true lossless, uncompressed. Hard Disk space is cheap these days, and it's only going to get cheaper. I don't know if it's worth all the fuss to save 1/4 of the space (uncompressed, Yoshimi weighs in at 479.5mb).

I didn't set out to test the quality originally. There have been reports of audio problems with quite a few of the 4G 40gb iPods recently and I was looking to see if I had in fact purchased one of these problems. Thankfully, I got a good one.


That's my 2-cents I guess