iPad sounds great!

Driven by curiosity, I decided to listen to some music through my ipad. What I did was to stream albums in Apple Loosless from my itunes library through home sharing.
Maybe this is old news to some of you but I was very surprised that it sounded great.

I also have an ipod touch and an iphone 3g and the ipad sounded significantly better than both. The music on the Ipod touch lacked in details while the Iphone was unnaturally bright.
On the other hand, the ipad had a very full sound with extended highs that were not too bright and good mids and lows. Comparing to how these same tracks sound on my $70K+ stereo I would say that my ipad, although definitely not equal to it, was actually kind of close.

The only thing that ipad was lacking was a realistic soundstage, something that was painfully obvious when listening to well recorded classical or some jazz.

Anyway, that's all I wanted to say.
I did all listening with some Sennheiser HD280 Pro, not the greatest cans in the world, so I am looking forward to seeing how ipad would sound connected to my stereo through a decent DAC.

Share your thoughts please!

 

Were the HD280's hooked up directly, or via a headphone amp? Just curious. And was this an iPad2?

I don't have one but have listened through my Android tablets (a GTablet and my Transformer). But I think it could definitely be better. I've used either my MiniBox E+ or my GT40 as a headphone amp for my HD600's. I keep wondering if my GT40 would actually work off the LOD of an iPad, and if so would that be an improvement the headphone out.

 

No, no amp, just directly to the headphone jack. I am sure that with a headphone amp and better cans it would sound better still.

 

I had an old I think it was gen 5 ipod (the last one with an actual hard drive), and it sounded surprisingly excellent with my senn 600s plugged right in there.

The headphone jack out on my MacPro sounds pretty great too (except for some occassional noise and squeaks that happen sometimes when there's no sound happening on the computer until whatever the sound is kicks in).

 

Whew - at first I thought you meant you were listening to the iPad via its built-in external speakers. I can say that my wife's iPad is respectably loud but sounds like crap via built-in external speakers, but I never thought to plug a set of headphones in.

I'm really astonished to hear that the iPad sounds good when using its built-in headphone amp, considering that my circa 2011 Macbook Air's headphone amp sounds pretty bad, especially with iTunes or most other software (Audirvana sounds the best, but really taxes this underpowered processor).

I would not have expected the even more compact and modestly-spec'ed iPad to outperform the Macbook Air (i.e., wouldn't have expected them to put a higher-quality headphone amp in the iPad, compared to Macbook Air). I'll have to see if I can talk my wife into letting me do some A/B comparisons with my Grado headphones, but she's very protective of her cherished iPad.

Craig.

 

DAC

iPad – Cirrus logic CS42L61
iPad2 – Cirrus logic CS42L63

itouch 3rd - Cirrus Logic CS4398
itouch 4th - Cirrus Logic CLI1560B0

iphone 3gs/4 - Cirrus Logic CS42L61
iphone 4s - Cirrus Logic CLI1560B0

http://www.cirrus.com/en/products/d-a_converters.html

 

iPod DACs? Wolfson?

 

all current ipods use Cirrus Logic

 

Interesting info.

My experience with listening to these devices infers the DAC has much less impact than the analog stages.

 

do you have any technical specs available of the ?various? analog stages?

 

Cool. I bought one for my wife, but have never listened to it. I've already discovered that it makes a great remote control for my music library too.

 

Try using it through an HRT iStreamer and call it a day. iPod Touch 3rd/4th Gen uses Wolfson DAC's by the way. Regards, Oscar

 

Hence my comment. I understand that iPods also used the Wolfson DACs at some time.

 

ipod touch 4th gen teardown -- note step 21 ..hope this helps

this information is freely available on the web to verify all current istuff models = Cirrus Logic

 

I have a 5th generation Wolfson DAC iPod that I play lossless files through a Ray Samuels Tomahawk amp into Grado SR80s and it's shocking how good such a modest setup can sound.

 

OK. Wolfson in the past, now Cirrus Logic.

 

I will agree that the iPad headphone jack sounds pretty good. It is my go-to device for plane trips these days. The one quibble is with the recommendation that one drive HD600s with it. My experience was not terribly positive. Plug in a set of HD-25IIs though and you have some very nice sound!

 

How much memory for songs does it have?

 

I have the 64gb model but I don't use that space for music. On average, I keep about 80 albums with me in Apple Lossless format. That is plenty for any given trip. The albums get swapped out frequently.

32gb is plenty and is what I would buy if I had it to do again.

 

YUP!

 

Older iPod "Classics" like the 4th gen, 5 gen and 5.5 gen used a Wolfson chip.

Would like to hear more opinions on the iPad(2). I don't use my Transformer for music playback too often, but with ICS on the horizon, and if an EQ is included, I might have to re-think that. I'm sure many of you have heard the rumor that the iPad2 might (and I stress "might") be getting a price drop when the iPad3 is released.

 

My Iphone 4S sounds excellent as well (not via it's built in speaker of course). In fact, very hard to differentiate between my ipad 2 and iphone 4S.

 

How important do you think this is?

I only use Iphone/Ipod?Ipad for secondary listening purposes so I haven't even compared them as there are enough sound quality issues to climb over in an aeroplane or whilst mowing the lawn as it is. At work I use my Macbook Pro through a Klipsch IGroove device, but only at lowish levels. None of it is hifi but still enjoyable enough for the music to shine through.

 

Agreed. My 5G iPod beats my iPod Classic in terms of sound quality.

 

iTune Genres on the iPad

Using iTunes on my iPod and iPhone, the drilldown from Genres is Artists, then Albums, then Songs. On the iPad the default drilldown seems to be directly from Genres to Songs. This does not work for me. Is there any way to change this?