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Zune HD Hands on Demo and Impressions
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Ipod not for purists
I have both an Iphone and a Touch but when I travel I do not take my Touch I take my SONY MP3 player and my bose earphones. If you want to listen to music at its best you would never choose an Ipod. (and thats a Fact)
The Zune looks dam good but music quality I have no idea
I have both an Iphone and a Touch but when I travel I do not take my Touch I take my SONY MP3 player and my bose earphones. If you want to listen to music at its best you would never choose an Ipod. (and thats a Fact)
The Zune looks dam good but music quality I have no idea
I disagree 100% the touch is the best mp3 player I have had....maybe you just have crappy music....no mp3 player can make milli vanilli sound good!
But I do agree baout headphones, I quit using the apple headphones about 2 days after i got the touch. I purchased a nice set of skullcandies that are amazing.
I do not think you understand his post then....
The post is quality of music which is independent of the other aspects of the player
ipod touch
i think that apple's iPod touch kicks the crap out of the zune. then again, i may be a tad biased, seeing as how most everything apple is amazing.
i think that apple's iPod touch kicks the crap out of the zune. then again, i may be a tad biased, seeing as how most everything apple is amazing.
omg im ditching my ipod touch now! xD just kidding. i wouldnt mind one. but since i use itunes so heavily and i have bought so much apps its too late.
but i really like the UI on that thing.
but i really like the UI on that thing.
What is a fact is that listening is largely subjective.
I sort of agree with your assessment, in the past I personally found many iPods lacking a bit in sound quality. But I think the current iPods are very good, including the 2G iPod Touch.
Someone could also make a snippy comment about your choice of heaphones (Bose marketing, etc.) but again that is ultimately subjective- what's most important is what sounds best to you.
True, unfortunately. iPods use inferior D/A converters (Apple loves to cut corners on things you can't see), they have a 78 dB S/N ratio which is worse than mp3 players from the likes of Creative, iRiver and - especially - Sony. I was really surprised when I bought my first iPod, started it up and heard a distinct power-up *pop* followed by clearly audible noise, it brought back memories from my old cassette Walkman.
Then again, who cares... mp3 is an anti-audiophile format to begin with. iPod Touch is great for so many other things that I don't really consider it an audio playback device... it's a handheld computer that happens to play audio.
Yeah. I bet the guys at Microsoft were really pleased that some chump gave their little baby to a pair of buffoons that can't even focus a camera. Embarrassing.
On a separate note. Am I alone in thinking that the interface needs some work? For one, moving your hand up and over all the content to hit a 'back' button seems clumsy. I know it's a convention on window based GUIs that have menu/toolbars along the top of the window (like all Mac and Windows OSs do) but it needn't be on a new handheld OS.
Wow, that couldn't be any further from the truth if it tried to be. Sony MP3 players are known to have incredibly weak headphone amps (usually 5mw+5mw @ 16Ohms, compared to the iPods 30mw+30mw @ 32Ohms). They're also known for coloring the sound, enhancing low frequency sounds to make it sound more boomy.
As far as headphones... Bose? Really? It's definitely a well known fact that Bose audio equipment is absolute junk. It's built poorly and sounds even worse than its built. http://intellexual.net/bose.html Theres a good article on their speaker quality which applies to their headphones as well.
Head on over to Head-Fi. You'll find the majority of people there are pushing an iPod with some sort of TRUE (non-Bose) high end headphone. For me, I use the 80GB 5.5G iPod with Audio Technica ATH-A500s (imported from Japan before they were available outside of Japan). That setup straight out of the headphone jack sounds better than any other portable audio set up I've heard and blows away Bose multi-speaker systems that cost 10x as much.
Properly encoded MP3 and AAC files (either LAME 3.98.2 using -v 0 -vbrnew or Quicktime's latest AAC encoder) have proven transparent in listening tests. Meaning they sound no different than the original CD.
S/N ratios don't mean much either. Creative used to rate their players and soundcards S/N ratios and list it in their specs. It wasn't until they got sued and countless individual tests showed the real S/N ratios were sometimes inflated by as much as half did they stop.
Up until the introduction of the iPhone, Apple used the same Wolfson DACs that were found in high end CD players and DVD-Audio players. The people over at Head-Fi have practically universally agreed that the 5.5G iPod was the best sounding, and the new Cirrus Logic DAC based iPod touch 2G sounds about the same.
iPods that had "sound quality issues" had bass roll-off problems with headphones with low resistance. Basically if you have a set of cheap $10 Sony earbuds that had a resistance of 16Ohms, you'd have a problem with not getting car stereo style boomy bass that some people seem to expect. But if you had a set of respectable headphones there was no sound quality impact.
MP3 players are my thing. I love audio more than anything else. I've heard just about every MP3 player out there on many sets of headphones. I've yet to hear anything that can match or beat the 80GB 5.5G iPod or 1G iPod touch running iPhone OS 2.x or 2G iPod touch with a respectable set of Audio Technica, Grado, Koss (only the KSC-75), Sennheiser, or AKG set of headphones.
I will say though, that the Zune with the same set of headphones comes VERY close to the iPod. It just lacks the final little bit of overall detail the iPods tend to have. But if one doesn't own an iPod, a Zune is the next best thing. Creative's players just sound as awful and as bloated and boomy and fatigue inducing as their soundcards. iRiver sounds like mud.
Have you ever used an iPhone or iPod touch? If you're browsing your music on one its not much different than what the Zune showed. Flick your finger, most of your selections are at the bottom of the screen, move your hand and finger back up to the top left of the screen to hit the back button..
+1,000. Bose sucks!
Sennheiser is my personal favorite. I've been drooling on these:
http://www.sennheiser.com/sennheiser/home_en.nsf/root/professional_headphones-headsets_headphones_502717
i am reminded of a sentiment I heard expressed somewhere today about M$, they get close to producing something brilliant - then saddle it with an egregious flaw (or two).
Zune pc software is certainly a candidate for the source of annoyance.
But let us remember - this zune is (logically) only the trial run for "project pink" - the zPhone.
Zune pc software is certainly a candidate for the source of annoyance.
But let us remember - this zune is (logically) only the trial run for "project pink" - the zPhone.
Updating the screens because a competitor has better ones sounds like a very un-Apple thing to do. Bleeding-edge hardware components just isn't their thing. They never lost sleep over the fact that just about every camera-equipped cellphone in the world has a better camera (and one that can record video, at that) than the iPhone has, and they clearly don't give a sh*t that their 30" screen uses older technology than practically everything else on the market. They don't give a toss that wireless keyboards and mice use rechargeable Li-Ion batteries now, they're still using the antiquated AA-battery solution. And they will not look at the Zune HD and go "OMG it has a slightly better screen than the iPhone, we have to top that immediately!!", they'll just shrug and stick with whatever they have.
Microsoft Bing looks awfully familiar. Maybe I should Google it!
But in SOME instances, even the imitator can out-preform the intended target (OLED, HD output, HD radio).
Nahhhh....microsoft are not imitators...their marketplac player bears absolutely no resemblance to the touch, just like when they said the original zune was a rembranding of toshiba...No Imitation At All, ms only innovates!
Btw, check out the samsung yp q2, one mean machine...oh wait it kinda looks like....
Btw, since this thread features Balmer with his known sweat issues and the zune at hand, shouldn't it be called:
"Zune HD SWEATY hands on Demo and Impressions "
Of course it's just as apple fanboys being mean...
Btw, check out the samsung yp q2, one mean machine...oh wait it kinda looks like....
Btw, since this thread features Balmer with his known sweat issues and the zune at hand, shouldn't it be called:
"Zune HD SWEATY hands on Demo and Impressions "
Of course it's just as apple fanboys being mean...
Just like every other search engine.Microsoft Bing looks awfully familiar.
But in SOME instances, even the imitator can out-preform the intended target (OLED, HD output, HD radio).
YMMV with the Samsung. I've tried it out and it takes some getting used to.Nahhhh....microsoft are not imitators...their marketplac player bears absolutely no resemblance to the touch, just like when they said the original zune was a rembranding of toshiba...No Imitation At All, ms only innovates!
Btw, check out the samsung yp q2, one mean machine...oh wait it kinda looks like....
Btw, since this thread features Balmer with his known sweat issues and the zune at hand, shouldn't it be called:
"Zune HD SWEATY hands on Demo and Impressions "
Of course it's just as apple fanboys being mean...