Found my old iPod Classic in a drawer last night and it still works

I dug out my 120GB iPod from 2008 that I thought was dead. Charged it up for an hour and it booted right up with all my old playlists from college. I compared the sound quality to my phone streaming the same songs and honestly the iPod sounded warmer and fuller. Has anyone else noticed old MP3 players having better audio than modern phones?

2 comments

2 Comments

harper_wells2d ago

oh totally, i noticed the same thing when i found my old zune. but to be fair, its not the mp3 player itself doing that. old ipods and stuff have a different audio chip and they use a DAC that is built for lower power and older standards. phones these days have to handle a bunch of stuff at once so they cut corners on the audio hardware to save battery and space. the ipod is just focusing on playing music. also your songs might be in a higher bitrate if you ripped them from CDs back then, streaming audio is compressed to hell and back. so its partly the hardware and partly the files themselves.

rivershah2d ago

Does swapping the old iPod's hard drive for an SSD mess with the sound quality at all?