iPhone Audio Output vs. MacBook Pro

I have noticed this as well. And it's not an equalization issue. I've used three different players, iTunes 11, Quicktime 7 player, and Decibel ( a player that is designed for the best audio output possible, and does not use the quicktime or iTunes APIs), and MP3s than sound great on my iPhone 5 sound terrible on my MacBook Pro 15'" mid 2010.

I am keeping all things as even as possible. Same AKG K240 heaphones. Same port (headphones). Same track, (in this case an INXS remastered track, but I've done this test with a wide assortment of tracks). The iPhone sounds warm, the bass steady and smooth, highs are clear. The Macbook Pro sounds strained, the highs harsh, too much sibilence, the bass sounds distorted.

I've tried a variety of different things, like reseting OS X, different players, changing sound outputs in sys prefs while playing track in quicktime, fiddling with the settings in Audio Midi Setup app. Nothing has worked. It sounds consistently poor.

Let me be clear. This is a "poor quality" that is unacceptible to _my_ ears. My wife barely could tell the difference (but she did), and she is oblivious to audiophile differences. So someone that is a casual listener could, perhaps, not hear what I'm talking about, but to a trained musician and video editor, it's unmistakable to me.

I read in other threads on boards like head-fi.org things such as "well what do you expect? all laptops have terrible DACs in them," and I would run with that hyptohesis if it weren't for the fact that my 108g iPhone outperforms my 7 lbs. laptop by a huge margin.

Have you tried playing your audio tracks in Finder or Quicktime? I found a significant improvement in quality when I played my lossless files and mp3s in Finder, as compared to when I played them in iTunes 10/11. I discovered the apparent audio degradation I was experiencing was the result of the iTunes "enhance sound" feature being on. It can be turned off in iTunes > Preferences. Turned it off, and I have much much better sound quality now (I'm using a 2010 15" Macbook Pro). Definitely better than my iPhone 3GS!

I wanted to chime in after my latest show-down between my iPhone 5 vs. iPad 3 vs. MacBook Pro 2010. My medium of choice is vinyl for hi-fi listening, but otherwise I prefer Spotify @ 320kbits.

I plugged them into my hi-fi system: rega brio-r amp, wharfedale diamond 10.1 speakers, standard [decent quality] 3.5mm to RCA cord to plug in each device. No DAC in my setup. No cable splitting-- all directly plugged in.

I used the latest Arcade Fire album, Reflektor, 320kbits from Spotify. I think the album has enough dynamic range to make it a good test subject. I started the test on track 2, that song in particular having a lot of dynamism.

The breakdown:

Iphone5 and iPad3 both sounded identical. Everything sounded good on first pass until I plugged in the MacBook Pro. The MacBook revealed an enormous difference in better audio quality! The MacBook output crystal clear highs and the lows also had a "thump" that the iPhone/ipad did not have. That difference right there showed that the MacBook is simply capable of handling a higher spectrum of sound. With a higher spectrum, and the ability to differentiate the highs, mids, and lows helped give the sound much more dimension.

Bottom line:

I wish I could turn back the clock on all those hours I spent listening to my iPhone. Without a doubt, the MacBook Pro has a much higher quality audio output. I think this is attributed to the fact that the MacBook actually has a SOUNDCARD while the iPhone/ipad both have like integrated circuit boards. It's the dedicated soundcard on the MacBook that gives it its advantage.

To break it down to hi-fi thinking, when a stereo has separate modular components that are dedicated to doing 1 thing well, there is a better opportunity for higher quality sound. That would be in comparison to an "all-in-one" unit that crams a lot of electronics into a single "stereo" system. Generally, the overall quality of the "all-in-one" will be hampered by what are basically the limitations of engineering and production; each new component/feature they cram on the same circuit board compromises the overall integrity of the whole. What I'm trying to say is that the MacBook is more like a modular setup with dedicated components, and the iPhone/ipad are the "all-in-one".

The equalization is probably set differently on the two devices.