I hear you Plaxico. Apple has historically been doing a terrible job on the audio front. It took them 11 years to make a marginal improvement to their ear buds. It's ridiculous that a company with that much cash is unwilling to invest in high end audio. It would be like if Bentley sold their cars with their own branded tires that performed like those assembled on the model T. Apple, since you obviously cannot engineer good speakers, try partnering with a company that does.
Oh, and one other thing- lets make sure that architecture of IOS does not constrain audio adjustment. The current presets (which only apply to the music app) belong on a Playskool music player. Adults prefer to adjust sound, not toggle arbitrary music genre settings and ambiguously named sound schemes. Deep? Deep what? Actually, Playskool might have more colors to choose from. Can't sound any worse than IOS audio with the amazing mono audio on my $700 ipad. Good thing they got around to stereo with the ipad mini and not the latest new ipad.
Apple needs to create a Vice President of Technology Standards because as they work to advance on new highly advanced technology, they are continuing to neglect the best standards that have been set in older technologies. As a result, the consumer ends up with an inferior basic tech (audio) that has been neglected by the focus of the advanced tech (retina display). The finished product will never be truly polished if they continue to operate this way.
I'm not anti-Apple. I really want them to make great sound. Steve Jobs was a perfectionist in many areas, and I feel it would be honoring his legacy if Apple made it their mission to work on creating the best audio from all their devices.
