Improving the audio quality of my portable digital music player

I have owned an Apple IPod Touch (3rd generation) for about 1.5 years and have used it like I'm sure a great proportion of the population do i.e. load it with all the music that I owned and have subsequently purchased, regardless of whether or not I intend to actually listen to it. Since catching the audiophile bug I've wondered if and how I could improve the audio playback quality of my current digital music player. This post will outline how I tried to achieve this and some of the interesting observations I made on the way.

So, as mentioned in a previous post I have centralised the storage and structure of my digital music collection within a Network Attached Storage (ReadyNAS) appliance. All of the music has been tagged using MediaMonkey and had album artwork added where missing. My chosen digital audio format is FLAC. This is because it:

1. lossless (the original recording untouched, but the data is compressed)
2. is able to support very high (HD) sampling rates (mp3 files are commonly sampled at 44KHz, but original recordings can be made at rates or 48, 92 and even 192KHz, giving you significantly more detail)
3. has fantastic software and hardware support (almost!) and is the format of choice for the digital audio authoring and publishing industries
   

So it seemed initially obvious that I should be able to just take the audio files that I have painstakingly (re)ripped at lossless quality (or purchased from sites such as HDTracks.com) and simply drop them onto my IPod. The reality was not so straight forward.

The most obvious and perhaps understandable issue was regarding size. A 'typical' MP3 track that is a few minutes long, recorded at a sampling rate of 44KHz will take up on average around 5MB of disk space. The same track recorded at 44KHz (not to mention 48 or 96KHz) in lossless would take about around 25MB. Scaling this up to an entire album means that you would get an average album for about 300MB, as opposed to 60MB in MP3 format. If the average music collection contained 100 albums, then this would require perhaps 30GB of your once limitless disk space. As my IPod Touch only has 30GB of disk space (actually 29.1 GB), which is partially used by the IPod OS and other nice things like Apps, Photos and Videos, I needed to sit down and think about what music I actually want to enjoy on the move, and what I wanted to reserve for my home audio system. Although not expected, this wasn't such a bad thing I believe as it allowed me to better appreciate the music I had and prioritise quality over quantity.

The second less-welcomed issue was specifically caused by my IPod. Apple does not support FLAC as a lossless digital music format, despite its widespread usage. Instead Apple have their own format called ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec). Because FLAC and ALAC are both lossless formats, the data they contain can be restructured into either format easily using a number of free third party tools. To get my nicely tagged and formatted lossless music into iTunes and therefore my IPod I needed to firstly convert all my chosen music into ALAC. What would have been really useful would be if iTunes supported a FLAC to ALAC conversion process as an integrated feature.

I don't want you to think that I have any issues with Apple products; I am very happy with my Touch (less so with iTunes on Windows 7, but that's another story), I just think that Apple could make it much easier for its users to work with lossless digital music files if they have them. As a side note, this restriction is not specific to IPods. Before this I had a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra (they really knew how to name a product!), which was in my opinion much more straight forward to use as it was essentially a portable (40GB) hard disk that could play music. This too could not work with FLAC files and instead expected lossless tracks to be in WAV format.

Once I jam-packed my IPod with lots of lossless music I turned to the last piece of the 'improving audio quality' challenge - headphone/earphone quality. The earphones that come with any digital music player are almost always of a very low quality. Perhaps this is because large portions of the public do not have any desire to investigate better audio quality, therefore the manufacturers see an obvious ways to cut production costs. Replacing the out of the box earphones with even just a sub-£15 set from manufacturers such as Sennheiser, Creative, Ashure (amongst many others) would give a massive improvement in return.

This Christmas I received a pair of Sennheiser CX400-II noise-isolating earphones which I'm just breaking in now. These coupled with my lossless audio tracks have really opened my eyes (or should I say ears) to what is possible and what the original musicians were trying to achieve when they originally recorded their tracks. Pink Floyd's 'Wish you were here' and Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue' for example sound simply amazing now.
I'm just trying to understand why I didn't go down this path much (much) sooner.

Hope this has been useful. Happy listening.