Next iPhone Key Selling Point: RETINA Audio

How can you be so limited? :eek: I'm not referring to the OP.
Clearly the OP was referring to a very high quality audio, to which the "retina" displays could be compared in terms of the quality they incorporate. This makes sense.
And yet you are ready to insult and act as superior beings. :eek: Limited people are limited.
 
how clear do you have to be these days to realise the OP didnt literally mean retina audio?

the people replying like it was an actual mistake are the ones that look stupid!

some people....
 
LostSoul80 said:
How can you be so limited? :eek: I'm not referring to the OP.
Clearly the OP was referring to a very high quality audio, to which the "retina" displays could be compared in terms of the quality they incorporate. This makes sense.
And yet you are ready to insult and act as superior beings. :eek: Limited people are limited.
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Pez555 said:
how clear do you have to be these days to realise the OP didnt literally mean retina audio?

some people....
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If you actually read the replies, you'll see that most people did understand the concept. That doesn't make it a good concept.
 
boss.king said:
If you actually read the replies, you'll see that most people did understand the concept. That doesn't make it a good concept.
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I wasn't obviously referring to those who understood what the OP meant. Also, "not a good concept" is your personal opinion, nothing more. That's open to discussion.
 
They should have named it Iris display, so there was a tie-in with Siri. Get it? Siri - Iris. Whadayathink?
 
Firstly, in terms of marketing, "retina audio" as a phrase doesn't make sense. Ideally, you should have done your research. However, I can of course see your point, referring to high definition audio...

But, as several others have said here, it is all source dependent. If we continue with the marketing theme, "high definition" audio is what they're calling lossless (see DTS-HD, Dolby True HD, and for uncompressed lossless, LPCM). For music, this would simply be ripping your music into WAV (uncompressed and, as a result lossless audio), or FLAC/ALAC (compressed lossless).

However, CDs are 16-bit/44.1KHz. In order to have what you would have described as "retina audio", Apple would have to collaborate with the music industry to provide 24-bit/192KHz studio master recordings to us, something which won't happen at this precise moment, as well as incorporating a DAC which will be able to handle this. This is nothing new; the likes of Linn do provide these recordings, and they do sound a good bit better than standard recordings (that said, you need high-end enough equipment to both play and hear the difference - luckily I have such a system, but don't have any of such recordings).

Worth it? No, not even for the most die-hard of audiophiles - I certainly would take the marginal sound quality hit (in the case of the iPhone) for the massive space savings.
 
swingerofbirch said:
To be fair, retina display doesn't make sense either.


EDIT:

To the at least four people who down voted, use your words!

How does retina display make sense?

It's as if you wanted to advertise a blanket as being soft and called it the epidermis blanket, because it's the epidermis of the skin that comes in contact with it.

You use your retina to look at something whether it's high resolution or not. Blind people use their retinas to detect varying degrees of light. It isn't logical to equate retina with high resolution.
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Is it called retina display because at 6" (I believe) the average eye can't differentiate pixels on a screen with more than 300ppi. Your eye actually limits the definition. You are seeing the highest definition your retina can handle. Retina display.
 
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swingerofbirch said:
To be fair, retina display doesn't make sense either.


EDIT:

To the at least four people who down voted, use your words!

How does retina display make sense?

It's as if you wanted to advertise a blanket as being soft and called it the epidermis blanket, because it's the epidermis of the skin that comes in contact with it.

You use your retina to look at something whether it's high resolution or not. Blind people use their retinas to detect varying degrees of light. It isn't logical to equate retina with high resolution.
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It's more logical to equate the eye with a high resolution than the eye with a sound. Nobody said retina makes absolute sense, but what's the point of taking something that makes little sense and using that same word to make less sense?

Hope you liked that answer. :)

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LostSoul80 said:
I wasn't obviously referring to those who understood what the OP meant. Also, "not a good concept" is your personal opinion, nothing more. That's open to discussion.
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"Not a good concept" is a lot of people's personal opinion here though, it would seem. Just because he said it was a bad concept doesn't mean he implied it is fact. By your own definition, there are no bad concepts because that is all left to interpretation.

Ever heard people make statements like "that's ugly" or "this tastes bad"? Did you correct them for stating opinion as fact? Because technically they did exactly that...
 
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How about a Retina Home button with a 4K tactile response and fully adjustable depth perception. :eek:

The audio could use a bump but then consider all the source material.
 
The phone portion of the iPhone and all other phones is not going to be high quality anytime in the near future. The original telephone designers had to deal with bandwidth limitations, and they chose a bandwidth that was just understandable. Today's phone still work on that basis.

The audio of music and such can be higher, but you can't get really good sound out of earbuds or speakers on such a small device.
 
swingerofbirch said:
To be fair, retina display doesn't make sense either.


EDIT:

To the at least four people who down voted, use your words!

How does retina display make sense?

It's as if you wanted to advertise a blanket as being soft and called it the epidermis blanket, because it's the epidermis of the skin that comes in contact with it.

You use your retina to look at something whether it's high resolution or not. Blind people use their retinas to detect varying degrees of light. It isn't logical to equate retina with high resolution.
Click to expand...
The idea is that, when held at a typical distance, the pixels of the retina display are small enough that the retina cannot resolve individual pixels; the whole display looks solid. Or to put it more simply, the retina display matches the human retina's resolution.

So a "cochlea" speaker I guess would reproduce sounds with sufficient quality to make it indistinguishable from being in the studio or whatever. What the OP doesn't realize is that for the vast majority of people, 256kbps AACs are at that point. While I'd certainly like 196/24 lossless, it wouldn't be a strong enough selling point to justify the cost. The iPhone already has much better DACs than other phones.
 
The problem is not so much 192kHz AAC vs. ALAC, the problem is that the audio playback itself is noisy.

Here's a little experiment for you: Take the Beatles' 'Magic Mystery Tour' album in ALAC. Crank up the volume to 100%. Put the right earbud in your ear and start 'Flying'. (Works with any other song that has low volume passages as well)

You're supposed to hear just a little bit of the rhythm on low volume before the guitar starts. Instead you hear mostly noise.

Some noise-reduction magic is one of the features that should be build into the iPhone 5.
 
Giuly said:
The problem is not so much 192kHz AAC vs. ALAC, the problem is that the audio playback itself is noisy.

Here's a little experiment for you: Take the Beatles' 'Magic Mystery Tour' album in ALAC. Crank up the volume to 100%. Put the right earbud in your ear and start 'Flying'. (Works with any other song that has low volume passages as well)

You're supposed to hear just a little bit of the rhythm on low volume before the guitar starts. Instead you hear mostly noise.

Some noise-reduction magic is one of the features that should be build into the iPhone 5.
Click to expand...
Noise reduction creates more artifacts than I'd like. Most of my music sound great through the iPhone. I haven't found any background noise that isn't supposed to be there(though that could be my tinnitus masking it to be honest). I use pretty high quality headphones and speakers though (audio technica, sennheiser, ultimate ears, and maybe some grados soon)

I cannot listen to most songs at 100% unless using high impedance headphones though.... In which case I'd use an amp. I can imagine there being extra noise at max volume.
 
Skullbussa said:
Wow, the peanut gallery is out in full force.

Regardless of "retina" the OP has a good point: phone audio sucks. This is a telco issue and not a phone issue but it would be nice if we had seamless VOIP hand-off for capable phones that could offer HD voice call quality without dipping into our data plans.
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Sorry you're WRONG there.

This is partially a telco issue but also the codecs (Half Full Rate and Full Rate) used to replicate voice depending on signal strength/quality. ALL phones use this for GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks and another set of codecs for 3G/HSPA+/LTE.

I'd like to see Apple incorporate CoreAudio as the main codec for both voice & music playback (playback, sourcing recording samples, API for apps to be tapped into, etc). If this with:

a proper DSP component in A5/A5X/A6 whatever the new microprocessor is that the next iPhone & next iPad uses would be incredible.
Also ability to use proper stereo speaker with superb quality reproduction in not just the highs but to mids or lows ... this would SMACK HTC's pockets with their partnership (with the now split) BeatsAudio company.
 
While it sounds good in theory, it really does't make any sense. If Apple decided to do this, they would need to include a quality pair of earbuds/headphones to advertise it, and show it right out of the box like Apple loves to do.

Another issue is lossless audio. They'd need to bump up their storage a ton to be able to hold the same amount of music as they do, I've seen loseless albums up in the gigibyte ranges of space.
 
"Retina audio" better not be a selling point for the next iPhone. That's even more useless than Siri. I want a freaking major redesign in both hardware and OS to make me switch from Android. Sure, the side effect can be better audio but it better not be a selling point.

And WTF! Retina relates to seeing, not hearing. LOL. Knowing the Apple masterminds they will call it iAudio (But Cowan Systems already own the name). But that never stops Apple from buying the rights to the name.
 
mrbutters said:
HTC put Beats Audio in that One X. I always thought it would be killer if Apple teamed up with Bose for the sound in their devices.
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Beats might be an improvement on the Apple buds but they are far from the best buds out there. The only real difference most people will notice is with better buds frankly speaking.
 
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