Mac:http://homepage.mac.com/beryrinaldo/AudioTron/MacMP3Gain/
How to improve the sound quality on your Ipod for free.
The equalizer in my 5G ipod sounded dreadful.Sound familiar?
I tried to boost the base but that just made everything distort.
So I set about exploring the why and how of this whole issue.
The answer is surprisingly simple, and I'm posting this web page so that others can find the solution rather than binning the lovely product that the ipod is.
The distortion caused as soon as the Equalizer is switched on is a design error in apple's equalizer software.
In a nutshell, because upping the base level adjusts the sound digitally, (rather than using analogue circuitry such as in an old fashioned bass control) the dac actually overloads the ipod's built in pre-amp, even at low volume levels.
The answer, however is dead simple.
All you have to do is reduce the base volume level of each track to 89db. This enables you to fiddle around with individual frequencies using the equalizer without causing overload of the preamp. And someone even wrote a utility to enable you to easily adjust the level of all your songs.
The difference in sound is amazing, and suddenly my ipod sounds gorgeous like i always imagined it would.
Apple need to look at this issue. The equalizer as is is worthless.
If the built in equalizer just dropped the overall song level by the same amount as the maximum bass boost selected then the pre-amp wouldn't be overloading.
In the meantime, anyone who is unhappy being unable to use the equalizer should get a copy of mp3gain or similar and just lower the db-register of their ipod songs, re-load the songs onto the ipod, and hey presto, it works like it always should have.
The tiny bit of sofware which runs through your mp3 files and non-protected (ie non-itunes-purchased) AAC files and corrects the levels is here :-
Mac:
http://homepage.mac.com/beryrinaldo/AudioTron/MacMP3Gain/
Windows:
http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/
And you can even up the overall level of your ipod to make up the difference using this :-
Mac & Windows
http://gopod.free-go.net/
Best wishes to all.
Nick Alexander.