iPod Touch sound quality

Question

iPod Touch sound quality

I am looking for another iPod to replace my old, good Touchbecause I do not need Touch anymore but still want to stay with Apple in music.

While looking for another iPod which is not Touch had a conversation with people who told me their sound quality on iPod Nano was noticeably worse than on Touch and this makes me worry.

I can believe cheaper iPod may have lower end sound processing hardware and/or firmware but which one exactly should I choose after Touch without loosing any sound quality? Looking at small Nano's but again what I said about other people's experience only raises doubts.

While specs may tell it is same I would appreciate your own experience.

Any thoughts please?

iPod touch (4th generation), iOS 6

Posted on Oct 14, 2012 9:57 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 15, 2012 12:59 AM in response to Kumachan Ikemen

if you ask any audiophile, they will laugh at you when you say you listen to an ipod, and thell recomend a Zune or somthing like that.

I have an iPod touch, nano and a MacBook. with my $40 Sony MDR-ZX100 head phones i can notice a small differance between my ipods and MacBook, but i cant tell a differance between the nano and touch.

somthing i do know is that the new 5th gen ipod touch has the same audio prosessing chip as the iPhone 5, as revealed in iFixits teardown: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPod+Touch+5th+Generation+Teardown/10803/3

quote:

"we find the Apple 338S1077 Cirrus audio codec. This is the same audio codec found in the iPhone 5."

hope i can help

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Answer 2

Oct 15, 2012 1:03 AM in response to Kumachan Ikemen

In my experience of owning an old Ipod Nano and an Ipod Touch, I have never been able to tell a difference in the sound quality of either Ipod at all. Of course the Ipod Touch has external speakers so headphones aren't neccessary but the sound is much better with headphones. With headphones there has never been a noticeable difference to me.

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Answer 3

Kyn Drake

Level 7

21,591 points

Jan 2, 2013 6:10 AM in response to Kumachan Ikemen

This article may have some information that would be good for your specific case. He's compared the latest iPod touch against the iPod nano and, from the data, cannot discern a difference.

http://handtokey.blogspot.com/2012/10/new-ipod-touch-5th-generation-audio_28.htm l

At one point in the article, he mentions that there's more difference between encoding at 256 and 320 than he's been able to see between these two.

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