iPod When did iTunes go bad for classic iPods?

[Ste_S]

I’ve recently picked up a G5 iMac and I’m encoding music and syncing to 2nd and 4th gen iPods on iTunes in Tiger, and to my ears, the music sounds better.
Previously, encoding music on later versions of iTunes or Music lead to distortion on playback, mostly when an EQ option was selected.

I presume iTunes/Music started to favour iPhones and iPod touches at some point with louder encoding, as in my experience, those have limiting tech built in to stop distortion when EQ is applied.

So when did this change happen?

 

[M.Brane]

I've never noticed this. Is it some setting you overlooked?

I buy mostly physical media, and all my discs are ripped as AIFF at full quality. The stuff I download is 24/94 high res. Stuff that that gets transferred to the phone is converted to M4A at 256KB on transfer.

I don't use any of the volume/EQ options.

 

[Ste_S]

I've never noticed this. Is it some setting you overlooked?

I buy mostly physical media, and all my discs are ripped as AIFF at full quality. The stuff I download is 24/94 high res. Stuff that that gets transferred to the phone is converted to M4A at 256KB on transfer.

I don't use any of the volume/EQ options.

If you're playing files on your iPhone, and not using EQ, then I don't think you'd notice any issues. iOS devices seem to manage EQ by dropping frequencies, rather than boosting them, which is what, I think, classic iPods tend to do. It's this boosting that can cause distortion.

I haven't done direct A to B testing yet, but I suspect older versions of iTunes better supported classic iPods with encoding that took this into account. If I get a chance, I'll encode the same track on iTunes on Tiger and Music on Tahoe and compare in suitable software.