StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Just saw this:

http://www.vuumaudio.com/

Vaccumtube amplifier for Ipod!

Who the hell thinks that this is a good idea? The MP3 compression allready kills that sound according to adiophiles (I can not tell the difference, but I am unintressted in that sort of stuff and I mostly lissen to audiobooks)

So what do our expertis in audio think about this?

I don't consider myself an audiophile, but CDs can be ripped into non-lossy formats instead of MP3s. Those tend to take up ~10x more space than MP3s, but it's not a major problem if you have a large-capacity iPod. The tradeoff is that you'd probably have to upload and download stuff from your iPod more often.

The jacks on iPods are shit. It's worthless to attach hardcore stuff to such a lowquality output.

Unless they fixed it lately.

I've played MP3s through live music-quality PAs from my laptop and it's sounded awesome, in all honesty. The .flac lossless and .mp3 320 vbr formats I cannot tell the difference between. Stark's right, it's the jacks that make the difference, an external soundcard or USB to Midi etc to a decent sound system is what makes something sound right.

The audio output quality on an iPod is actually quite good, it's not going to stack up against say, a Classé Delta CD player, but it matches up quite well with and may actually surpass typical consumer level CD/DVD players.

As for the amp, it's a tubey sounding tube amp and not really my cup of tea. It's nice in the sense that it'll smooth out music that's not that well recorded, but in doing so it colours the sound too much for my tastes. However, given that it's supposed to work with an iPod that's probably loaded with music of questionable sound quality, it's a pretty good choice in terms of voicing the system.

Not for me though, I want more accuracy & detail in my amps so I'd use different tubes & circuit designs.

Lossy music and ipod's really aren't that bad. I'd take an ipod and say, Shure E4c's over an Audigy and most of those bass-freak multimedia speaker sets they sell with computers any day. That said, isn't the amplifier element a Dared MP5?

Stark wrote:The jacks on iPods are shit. It's worthless to attach hardcore stuff to such a lowquality output.

Unless they fixed it lately.

The output is not through the jack. It's through the dock interface. I have no idea what quality of that output is, though.

Ypoknons wrote:That said, isn't the amplifier element a Dared MP5?

Yup, though I think they use slightly different tubes in different markets.