Recently I happened upon a first-generation iPod Shuffle that someone gave me back in 2005. I haven’t used it in several years, so I was surprised that the battery was still intact. I charged it up and attempted to dock it with my computer, but it froze iTunes and I had to remove it.
When I attempt to listen to the Shuffle, the songs are weirdly distorted. The drums sound almost perfect and sometimes the guitars are intact, but the audio is always muffled with reverb and odd electronic noise popping in and out of the audio. It’s almost as if someone has rerecorded all the songs on my iPod in a crowded Chuck E. Cheese arcade, underwater, with slot machines going off in the background. What could possibly account for this? Are the files corrupted or is the audio out jack degraded somehow (warning: I know nothing about electronics)? I would have thought that corrupted files just wouldn’t play, not add extra noise to the playback.
I agree with you–corrupted files just don’t play. My first instinct would be the headphones, but I assume that, since you mention the audio jack, you’ve tried multiple sets.
The audiojack is a pretty good idea. If it’s unshielded, it might be picking up various other sounds from the electronics. I know my sound card in one of my old computers would pick up noise from the DVD drive, adding a ton of noise every time I put a DVD in.
Yeah, corruption is unlikely. You can probably isolate the problem by just playing one of the songs on the shuffle on your computer; if it plays fine, then there’s a problem with the device, not the song.
Alternately, copy a known good song file to the shuffle (this is somewhat less reasonable with your specific device since it’s a shuffle and thus you can’t skip right to this song).
…some headphones cause problems with some models of iPod due to contact between the metal casing and the base of the headphone prong. Try backing the prong out of the jack just a millimeter or so to see if that solves it. OR, you can wrap some scotch tape around the metal base of the prong to eliminate contact. Best long-term solution is to find headphone that don’t cause this problem. You don’t need to drop the $$ on Apple OEM, there are many aftermarket sets that work fine. Good luck!
The reason voice is affected more than drums has something to do with the way the stereo signal is carried. Instead of four connections (i.e., positive and negative for each channel), headphones only have three (positive for each channel, and common negative, or maybe other way ‘round.) Anyway, the distortion comes where the right and left signals are very similar, or maybe it’s where they’re different? Dunno, gettin’ outta my range here…