Are all mp3 players the same?

Factual Questions
1

There’s a whole industry based around buying the highest possible quality of hi-fi listening equipment, but when it comes to mp3 players no-one seems very interested. Manufacturers’ websites, reviews and user forums hardly mention the audio quality.

I do care, and I own Shure e4s to prove it. I have owned various Creative and Archos models and listened to Ipods, and I must admit that the audio quality of them all seem very similar.

So - why does no-one seem to care? Is there a difference between different brands and models? If so, which are better?

(And, mods, is this the right forum?)

2

There are two reasons.

  1. A lot of the industry around high fidelity audio is snake oil.

  2. The expensive and difficult part of high fidelity audio is the speakers. You can buy much more expensive headphones than the ones that come with your ipod.

3

Part of it is that the super-audiophiles aren’t listening to MP3s in the first place. MP3 is a lossy format so, by its nature, you aren’t getting the best quality sound out of any MP3 player.

So, past a certain point it doesn’t matter because the sound quality is limited by the format itself.

4

I think that it’s because MP3 is a compression format. It reduces the audio quality in order to make the file a more manageable size. Most people don’t seem to care about the loss of quality (and, in fact, can’t really tell). They do, however, like the convenience and portability.

OTOH, because of the decrease in quality, there’s not really a market (based purely on sound quality) for high-end MP3 equipment.

ETA: on preview, what they said.

5

I’d have thought that the two principal factors regulating sound quality in this situation, would be the compression ratio of the mp3 file, and the quality of the headphones. And of course neither of those are inherent in the model of mp3 player.

6

Hell, die-hard audiophiles are to this day still arguing about “the warmth of vinyl”! Don’t even get me started on those guys… :smiley:

7

The iPod will play Apple’s lossless format. I don’t know about others, but I’d guess that most players can at least play WAVs, and the good ones can play FLAC or something like that. But, even if you have good quality inputs, are the electronics and DACs on the players actually good enough to make it worthwhile? I doubt it.