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The Quality of Music: Or why the iPod Sucks
The Olive Opus Alternative
10/10/2007 by Rob Enderle
For most of us we have gotten used to relatively low quality music as provided by most MP3 players and, if you have compared the new iPod Touch to earlier iPods, and have an ear for music, you'll notice that, over time, the quality of the music on iPods has declined. Granted it may be the increasingly horrid earbuds but why are we trading off sound quality for anything?
Honestly I'm not sure most notice as often we are listening to music while we are doing other things and not stopping to really enjoy the tracks. In the home we have a variety of web streaming solutions but most are designed around being inexpensive and are also limited by the quality of the music being streamed which is optimized more for the network, which has its limitations, than in delivering high quality sound.
If I were to sum up the trend, whether it relates to Apple or almost anyone else, it has been to provide more cheaper music you can more easily get to and not to provide a better listening, in terms of sound quality, experience.
The other problem is DRM and the tendency to dictate what you can do with the music you buy. This appears to be getting better with Apple's EMI agreement and Amazon offering a large number of tracks you can buy without DRM hooks into it.
Unfortunately much of this is still relatively low quality (below CD quality) and comes with some form of watermarking which reports back your personal information (granted, if I have a choice I prefer watermarking over DRM but there are privacy issues that some find unacceptable).
There is a company here in the Silicon Valley called Olive and they have this Opus line of products http://www.olive.us. These are not cheap but they are digital home players designed around the idea that music should be high quality and not restricted. The players, which are hard drive based, put out sound quality in line with high end CD Players and, for audiophiles, are worth the cost.
They aren't cheap starting at $1,100 and going up to $3,000 for the true audiophile offering that can hold, and serve up, 2,200 CDs. If you buy the music from them, and currently their purchased tracks are focused on MusicGiants which distributes for Concord Music Group and Naxos Classical the cost is $1.29 per track but this if full CD quality with no compromises and, initially, you can only get them as part of your purchase or on a portable hard drive so you'll need to buy them in high quantity.
After the end of the year they will have implemented a download service as well. The unit will play a number of internet radio stations now and will rip your CDs into the same high quality lossless format.
I met these folks awhile and was impressed with their focus on quality and think more in this space need to rediscover the idea that music can sound so much better than it does on a typical MP3 player and am on the warpath http://www.itbusinessedge.com with regard to how the RIAA is behaving right now.
Wrapping Up
If don't we want this tendency to lower the quality of what we buy and for vendors to treat us as criminals when we need to change our buying behavior.
We should factor into our decisions how the company we are buying from is treating us and favor firms who are moving aggressively away from DRM and treating customers as criminals and towards those that are focused on providing high quality and the freedoms we believe we are entitled to. Olive appears to be such a company, its worth checking out.
As seen on http://www.technologypundits.com