If you have ever designed a colour document on your computer and then printed it out on your inkjet or laser printer you may have noticed that the colours come out slightly different.  This is partly to do with the fact that  printing with ink on a piece of paper is a different process to creating colour on a computer monitor,  but it is possible to calibrate your monitor so that the colours match up as closely as they can.  This article gives you some tips on basic monitor colour calibration.

The colour on your Printer

Every printer uses slightly different inks and so the same ink combinations print out slightly different hues  on different printers.  Built into every Apple Computer is a technology called ColorSync which tries to address this problem.  ColorSync tries to match the colour on the screen with the colour that is printed on your printer so that if you choose a particular shade of green on your computer monitor, that same shade of green will be printed on the printer. It’s not failsafe, but it helps.

Apple computers come loaded with printer drivers for most printers, and these printer drivers contain the information that the computer needs to know how the printer will print certain colours.   Most printers will have a different colour profile for each type of paper you are printing on, so as long as you select the right type of paper (e.g. Gloss Photo, plain etc)  your Macintosh will know the colour that is being printed by the printer, and will try to match it to the screen.

The colour on your Monitor.

Different monitors display the same colours slightly differently. In most cases your OS X computer  will automatically detect the monitor  that is connected to it and use the correct colour profile for that monitor to try to match what you see to the colour that will print.  You can adjust the profile of monitor yourself and this article explains how.  What you see on your monitor is affected by your contrast and brightness settings, the age of your screen, the light in the room you’re working in, so it’s worth calibrating your monitor manually anyway.

Here’s  how to calibrate  your monitor using the built-in Apple calibration tool.

1.  Go to the Apple menu and open the System Preferences,  and click on “Displays”

2. Click on the ‘Color’  tab  and you will see a list of ‘profiles’  with one of them highlighted in grey. In my case ‘Cinema Display’ is  highlighted because I have an Apple Cinema Display.

Click on the color tab of the displays preference pane.

3. To manually calibrate your monitor, select ‘Calibrate’.  Don’t worry about losing your existing settings because at the end of the process you will be asked for a new name to save the new settings under. A calibration assistant will appear, choose ‘Expert Mode’ and then Continue.

There are 5 or 6 steps to the process, it will take you through them one by one, asking you to compare colours and move sliders. Sometimes it can help to squint.

Step 4 in the setup is called “Target Gamma”. Just go with the recommended 2.2.

Step 5 is Select Target White point. You will notice it dramatically changes what you see on the screen! It is trying to emulate the difference between looking at  a piece of paper under different lighting conditions. A piece of ‘white’ paper will be yellow or blue depending on the surrounding light conditions. White Point is setting the colour of your ‘white’. I suggest holding a white piece of paper up next to your monitor and matching the monitor white point to that. This way your monitor white point will be the natural whit point of your room. It may be that your room has an un-natural blue light and you’d prefer a more natural white point, it’s personal preference, but it will change the way you perceive colours on your monitor. I like to make a few different profiles with different white points and then I can easily switch between them. The standard white-point setting is 6500.

Step 7 is give it a name and then you are set.

I have my general monitor calibration setting. It’s set up for mainly internet work.

I also have one I use for professional printing jobs that I’ve tried to match to the printer I use.

Sending something off to get printed.

There are some colours that you can create on a monitor  that are impossible to print on a normal inkjet printer! For example certain oranges, fluorescent colours etc. The way the get these printed, for example on a logo, is that you specify the colour you want from a sample sheet of colours the printer gives to you. The printer then uses that coloured ink, rather than the normal CYMK ink. This is called spot colour. If you are doing a one colour logo or a T-Shirt you may want to choose a spot colour.

If you want to be certain of a particular CYMK colour you are printing you can get a pantone colour sheet from your printing company, it looks something like this:

Each colour entry tells you the CYMK values for that colour.

For example, here’s a sample orange colour from the printing company.

This means that if on your macintosh computer, you go to the colour picker in any program, and choose the CYMK sliders, you can set C to 0, M to 68, Y to 100 and K (black) to 0, and choose this exact colour.

Now that you have put in the exact colour by numbers, it doesn’t matter what it looks like on your screen or home inkjet printer. When you send it away and it gets printer by the printing company that sent you the chart, it will be EXACTLY that colour that you saw in their sample chart.

If you have a pantone colour chart from a printer (they are free -you just need to ask for one) you can put some of the colours into a color-filled box in a program like Pages and see how close your monitor (or home printer) is to the actual printed colours. This will give you an idea as to how well your monitor (or printer) is calibrated.

In the end, when doing Desktop Publishing, the main thing to remember is never trust your monitor, especially when choosing colours or editing photos, always check the colour of the printed out version.

Here are three different ways to put Lion on a USB thumb drive. If you buy and install Lion from the App Store  it downloads all 3Gigabytes from the App Store, installs Lion, then deletes the installer!  So when you go to install it on another machine it needs another 3Gigabyte download! Here’s how to make a re-usable installer.

Option 1: Put a full bootable Lion installation on the USB Drive with a recovery partition.

What you need: an 8G thumb drive and OS X Lion from the App Store.

What you get: A USB stick you can boot off and repair your Lion installation from.

Download the Lion installer from Apple App Store. DO NOT INSTALL IT ONTO YOUR COMPUTER OR THE INSTALLER WILL DELETE ITSELF. MAKE A COPY OF THE INSTALLER.  If you have already installed it and it has deleted itself,  go back into the App store and click on ‘purchases’ and next to Lion it will say ‘Installed’. Now option-click on ‘purchases’ and ‘installed’ will change to ‘install’ so that you can re-download the installer.

Format your Thumbdrive using a GUID Partition Table, and ‘ Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’, then you can run the Lion installer and install Lion onto the thumb drive.

More info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

Option 2: Create a Lion Recovery Disk.

You’ll only need a 4G USB Drive for this option.

What you get: A USB stick you can repair your Lion installation from, but not run Lion from.

If your Macintosh has an existing Lion Recovery partition (this will be the case if Lion came pre-installed on your machine when you purchased your computer from Apple), you can use this method. It will not be a fill installer but it will use the internet to install Lion onto another computer. It involves downloading a program from apple called ‘Lion Recovery Disk Assistant’

More info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433

To test if you have a Lion recovery partition, Just hold down Command-R during startup and Lion will give you the option of going into recovery mode if the recovery partition is there.

Option 3: Make a Lion Installation USB Thumb drive like the one you buy from Apple.

What you get: A USB stick you can install Lion from – like the one that comes from Apple.

You’ll need an 8G USB thumbdrive.

1. Purchase and download the Lion Installer via the App store as in Option 1 above.

2. Right-click on the installer and select “Show Package Contents” and find  the file called  ”InstallESD.dmg” in the SharedSupport folder.

3. Use Disk Utility to ‘Restore’ this dmg file to a thumb drive to make a Lion Installation USB drive like you buy from the Apple Store. (the thumb drive must first be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with GUID Partition Table.)

More info on this here.

There appears to be a compatibility issue with Mac OSX lion and lots of printers.   (Talked about here on the apple support pages)  The printer may or may not work properly, but you will get an error that says “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.”

When I try to print on my new Fuji Xerox document C4350 last week I got an error saying “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” and the printer would not even print.  If you play around with a different print setting (e.g. USB, Jetdirect, LPD, IPP) you may be able to get the printer working (still with the error!) till Apple repairs the problem. Here’s how I got my Xerox printer working.

How to get a Fuji Xerox Printer working with OSX Lion

I just purchased a Fuji Xerox Docuprint C4350, and there have been a couple of issues getting it running.

1. Installing the Drivers

The 1st issue is that the Fuji Xerox drivers from the website do not run under Lion, they are PPC code which means you need to have a PowerPC computer or Rosetta to run the installer. The actual PPD files are fine however, so the workaround is to install the drivers onto an older computer (I used my old G4 Powerbook) and then copy them via thumb drive or e-mail onto your new computer.

In my case the file was called “FX DocuPrint C4350 PS.”  The Installer puts it into the Library/Printers folder and you need to move it anywhere on your Lion machine then when you are selecting the driver  choose ‘Other’ and find the file.

2. “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” ERROR

After setting up the IP address on the printer and then selecting the computer to print using IPP printing, whenever I tried to print I would get the error “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” Not only this –  it would pause the printer queue and not print the page! A little Google search shows that this is a common error under Lion.

In my case I found 2 other ways to get the printer working.
The 1st was simply to plug it in by USB instead of Ethernet printing. This gave me no errors at all and the printing works fine, it’s just a bit slower.

The 2nd way was to still use IP printing but select HP Jetdirect – Socket instead of IPP printing. Xerox calls it port 9100 instead of JetDirect so make sure on your Xerox printer you enable port 9100. This still gives the error, but the printer at least prints the page normally.

This is not for the beginner, it’s quite technical, but here’s how to do it.

Now you could upgrade your entire hard drive but with a 480G SSD drive costing $1579.99, it’s not a cheap option!  But you can upgrade just to a smaller boot drive (a 64G drive costs $119) to run OSX and your applications. This means your system files and applications are on the new SSD drive, but your user data (iphoto, itunes etc) stay on your old Hard Disk.

SSD Boot Drive using a different drive for my user folder - less than half the 64G SSD is used!

An SDD drive looks the same shape as a traditional drive, making it easier to install, but it uses memory instead of a hard disk so it is much, much faster. If your computer is a bit old and slow this may be a better solution than upgrading your whole computer because often it’s not the processor speed that slows things down but the hard drive.

Here’s how to set up an SSD drive to run your OSX and applications off, and keep using your existing hard drive for your user files.

1. Work out how big a boot drive you need.

Everything except your user data will go on the boot drive. To work out how much space you need, do this:

(a) Find your total disk usage. Click on your hard drive and press Apple-I, check how much space is used. For me it’s 587 Gig:

(b) Find your user folder usage. Select your user folder (the onew with a house as an icon – this is where all your documents, music, movies, photos etc are stores) and press Apple-I, it may take a while to calculate it.) If you have more than one user, you’ll need to do it for each folder and add them up. I only have one user and for me it was 550GB:

Subtract (b) from (a) to give you the amount needed for your boot drive.

587GB – 550GB = 37GB.  I need 37GB for all my apps and system software. A 40GB drive would just to it, so I went for a 64GB drive.  I ordered a 64GB M4 SSD from Crucial in the USA  for US$119.

2. Connect the Hard Drive to your mac.

For a mac pro it simply connects into the spare optical bay slot – no adapters needed, a 30 second operation – see how here.
Difficulty: easy – 30 seconds.

For a new aluminium mac mini it can replace one of the internal drives.
Difficulty: moderate – 1/2 hr.

When I replaced the internal SSD drive in my mac mini I needed to pull out the fan and motherboard to get the new SSD drive in! You can get the old hard disk out without pulling out the motherboard but the SSD drives are actually ever so slightly thicker and more uniform in shape so the motherboard needs to come out to manoeuvre the SSD drive in place.

For a macbook or macbook pro you’ll need replace the internal optical drive with your old Hard Drive (OWC who also sell SSD drives provide a kit to do this here) then to put the SSD drive where your old Hard Drive was. The other more expensive option is to order a large SSD drive and replace your old hard drive with it.
Difficulty: hard – 1-2 hours.

iMac: Forget it! Your simplest option is to put the SDD drive in an enclosure and leave it plugged in all the time.

3. Format the SSD Drive using disk utility.

After your SDD drive is plugged in you’ll need to power on your computer and use Disk Utility to format it – Mac OS Extended (Journaled):

4. Copy everything except your user directory onto the new boot drive.

Now you need to copy your system folder and applications onto your SSD drive. You can’t do this by hand – there are hidden files that need to be copied, so use Carbon Copy Cloner. Using Carbon Copy Cloner, select your boot drive as the target Disk and then select Incremental backup:

Now select your main hard drive as the source disk, but then deselect your main user directory so that you don’t copy across all your user data (it won’t fit!)

Click Clone and your boot disk will be created on the SSD disk.

5. Reboot from the new SSD boot drive.

Under System Preferences click Startup Drive select the SSD Drive, then restart! (wow – notice how fast it is!)

Since it is now looking for your user data on the new drive, it won’t find anything and so your desktop and dock will be the default ones and all your files will be missing. Don’t panic – in the next step we will get your old files back.

6. Select your old User folder.

Go to System Preferences, then Accounts, (in Lion this is now called ‘Users and Groups’) then ‘Click the lock to make changes’ and control-click the main user account and click Advanced Options.

In the advanced options tab choose your old user directory, which is back on your original hard drive.

Your computer will tell you that you need to restart, and when you restart you will be running off your new boot drive,with your user directory on your old hard disk.

So how fast is it? Here’s a demo of how quickly applications launch from my new SSD drive…

Apple have built in website filtering into OS X under the ‘System Preferences’ – ‘Parental Controls’ but Parental Control cannot be enabled for administrator accounts (which is probably the account you are running from) and  Parental Controls also becomes hard to manage if you have multiple users because you need to set it up for each one.  Here’s how to set up internet filtering on your whole home network at once using a free service called OpenDNS. Once it’s set up this can help block unsuitable content from reaching any computer, iphone, ipad etc connected to your internet. This approach can be used at home, school, or the workplace.

DNS Stands for domain name server. A DNS  is like a big phonebook and every time your computer or iPad or iPhone goes to a webpage (e.g. apple.com) it looks up the name you have given it (apple.com)  and converts it to a number  (e.g. 192.124.1.2) which it then uses to find the webpage.

This what you do when you phone someone.  You look up their name in a phone book to get their phone number  and then you ring their phone number.  A simple way  of limiting the people who you could ring would be to not give you their phone number. That’s how web filtering with Open DNS works.

A DNS is like a big internet phonebook where your computer looks up webpage addresses.

When you signed up for Internet access with your local Internet Provider  they gave you a DNS number to put into your computer – something like 192.231.203.132.  This number is the place your computer goes to look up the address of every page you visit.

Open DNS is a free DNS service, but it has settings to restrict what sites you can access. It’s like a phonebook with all the ‘unwanted’ phone numbers missing.  To use open DNS you replace  the DNS numbers on your computer with the  Open DNS numbers.   Your computer will be unable to find  some websites because open DNS  won’t give your computer the address when it asks for it.

I’ve tried to explain the concepts clearly, but getting it running can be tricky, so read on and you may need to get a computer friend to help you out!

Here’s how to set it up.
1. Have a look at this image. It should say “Use Open DNS”. After you switch to Open DNS the image will change and it will say “You’re using Open DNS”!

2. Go to opendns.com and set up a free account.  Go to the open DNS dashboard and select Internet filtering, and the level of filtering you require. Here are what some of the options look like (click to enlarge):

3. Open your Router settings (the Router is the device that plugs into your internet connection and shares it with all your computers). We are setting this up on your router so that  it will affect all your computers. Find the setting that says DNS Servers and put in the Open DNS server numbers.  (Before you do this make a note of the old DNS settings, you will need them later when you are testing.) The Open DNS numbers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

Here are the DNS settings on my wireless router.

4. Restart  your computer and your router, and come back to this page and a little button in step one should have changed to show you that you are now using OpenDNS.

5. Go to www.internetbadguys.com (a test site) and you should get a blocked message something like this:

6.  Securing it.

What we had just done is we have made the default DNS  server  the server that your computer goes to.  The problem is that if you manually type in DNS settings in your computer network settings it will bypass the Open DNS settings.  So what we need to do now is to help your router not to allow any other DNS  settings through.  To do this go to the firewall settings on your router (not your computer)  and block all outgoing TCP  and UDP  requests on port 53  that are not going to Open DNS.  This can be a little bit tricky, but here’s how I did it on my router,  which is a Draytek Vigor 2700.

I had to add three rules.

1.  allow DNS lookups that are going to open DNS 208.67.222.222

2.  allow DNS lookups that are going to open DNS 208.67.220.220

3.  block any other  DNS lookups.

Here’s where I added the rules:

Here’s where I added the Rules:

On the Draytek modem the firewall settings are set up under default data filter

Here are the three rules I added:

I added rules two, three, and four.

Rule 1 & 2 (called rule 1 and 2 because there was already a rule in there)

Rule 2 allows any traffic going to the Open DNS server. Rule 3 was the same as rule to accept it used the second DNS number.

Rule 3 (called rule 4).

Rule 4 comes after rule 1 and 2 and it blocks any remaining DNS requests.

Testing.

Type in your old DNS settings into your Macintosh system preferences, ( system preferences –  network settings- DNS Server) and press apply.

Open Safari and type in an address (eg apple.com) – you should not be able to go to any websites at all.

Delete the DNS address  from your Macintosh system preferences, the open DNS settings should reappear, and you should be able to browse the web, but not restricted sites.

The only way I can think of getting round this without the router password is to reset the router to the default factory settings, but then OpenDNS will stop altogether, and you’ll notice someone is playing with things!

I’ve just moved all the images from macintoshhowto.com over to Amazon Cloudfront. The bottom line is that you should notice macintoshhowto.com speed up. If you want to know how to do it, read on.

How to make your wordpress site real fast using Amazon Cloudfront.

Cloudfront is a way to speed up your web content delivery. Amazon has fast servers all round the world and they are letting people (for a price!) use their infastructure to serve up copies of their own files such as pictures, backgrounds etc. These static files are stored on the Amazon Cloudfront servers. When someone visits your website the main part of your page (the bits that need to actually run php code and so on) come from your own server, but all the images and so on come from the Amazon Cloudfront. This speeds up you site in two ways. 1. Amazon delivers your pictures real fast. 2. This reduces the demand on your own server, making it faster as well.

There are two ways for Cloudfront to work.
1. You upload all your wordpress static files (you wp-content and wp-includes folders) onto Amazon S3, then tell Cloudfront to get your files from Amazon S3 as it needs them.
OR
2. You tell Cloudfront to get the files directly from your site as it needs them. This second way is called ‘Origin Pull’.

The advantage of 1 is that if you ever change your wordpress host, your entire wp-content folder is stored off-site at Amazon S3, so you don’t need to even copy your wp-content folder to your new wordpress installation. The new S3 wp-content folder becomes your wp-content folder – you can even load images directly to S3 and then insert them into your wordpress posts.
The advantage of 2 is that it’s easier and cheaper, and you don’t need to upload the files to Amazon each time you make a new post.

Here is how to setup your wordpress site to use CloudFront via Origin Pull (the second of the above two options). You need to set up an Amazon Cloudfront account, and install one of two cache plugins, WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. The Cache plugins will redirect your browser to get the static content from Amazon instead of your site. It’s really quite simple, you just need to put the Cloudfront details into your Cache plugin, and then put your wordpress URL into your Cloudfront account.

STEP 1: SET UP A CLOUDFRONT ACCOUNT

1. Go to Amazon Web Services – http://aws.amazon.com and sign up for Amazon Cloudfront content delivery. If you already have an amazon.com account it can be linked to that account for payment.

2. Go to the Cloudfront Management Console – https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/home

3. Click on ‘Create Distribution’. The following window will appear.

Select Custom Origin not Amazon S3. This means it will automatically pull the content it needs from your website. Enter your website URL under Origin DNS Name: This is where it will pull the content from.

4. Press Continue and on the next page leave everything blank except fill in the comment with something meaningful then press continue.

5. Press Create Distribution.

Check the details and press 'Create Distribution'.

6. The new distribution will appear in the console. Copy the domain name.

6. Copy the domain name. In my case the URL is d3hnrcqh47hd0x.cloudfront.net

STEP 2: PUT THE CLOUDFRONT DETAILS INTO WORDPRESS

Now you will need to go into your wordpress admin and set up the cloudfront server as the place wordpress will go for all your static content files. You do this from the Super Cache or W3 Total Cache plugin.

In WP Super Cache, go to the CDN tab and enter the URL from the cloudfront into the ‘Off-site URL field, and select the ‘Enable CDN Support’ tab. Press ‘Save Changes’

Entering the Cloudfront URL into WP Super Cache

In W3 Total Cache go to the ‘Content Delivery Network’ page, then enter the details under “Replace Site’s hostname with:”

Entering the Cloudfront URL into W3 Total Cache

Unfortunately in W3 Total Cache you will need to fill in the Access key ID and other fields even though these are not needed if you are using Origin Pull. They are only needed if you want to use Amazon S3 as a bucket to load the cloudfront files. We are using Origin Pull so these settings are not needed. Just put in anything like this:

The login details can be anything if you are using Origin Pull because it's Amazon Cloudfront that does the work, not W3 Total Cache.

Also you can ignore any messages like this one below. They don’t apply for Origin Pull. They are telling you that you need to update the files in the S3 bucket, but you’re not using the S3 bucket.

Give it a try!

To test that it’s working, go to your webpage, then from Safari click ‘view source’. You should see the URL of the images in the HTML file are now coming from the cloud server:

img src="http://d3hnrcqh47hd0x.cloudfront.net/wp-content/themes/dpc/images/logo.png" alt="dpc.com"

That’s it. The images and other static files are now coming from the Amazon Cloudserver. It’s all automatic. If you want you can tweak the cache settings to change what files come from the Cloudserver and what come from your site.

I purchased mine from RIHAC in Melbourne, Australia. They have a good unit, with good instructions as well as good phone support, the sell the CIS system for about $150 and it comes with I think it was 100ml of ink per color. Installing the CIS system is about the same complexity as changing a pushbike tyre, or sewing a button on a shirt. If you can follow instructions, you should be able to install it OK. Mine’s been going about 2 years now with no problems at all.

In this post I talked about the audio quality of the various iPods, and mentioned a mod for 4th and 5th Generation iPods that gives them excellent audio quality rivalling that of a $1500 CD player. Well, here is how to do the mod on a 4th gen color iPod photo – Apple model number A1099.

The 4th Gen iPods have a Wolfson WM8975 audio chip in them.

The pinout is something like this (this is a pinout of the WM8971).

ROUT1 and LOUT1 go to the headphone connector, via some capacitors etc, while ROUT2 and LOUT2 go to the dock connector (line out). There are resistors, capacitors and inductors of low quality on the signal path, but the Wolfson IC itself is a top of the range audio chip. The mod involves running a wire directly from LOUT2 and ROUT2, via some Black Gate capacitors, to the headphone jack, which will now become a high quality  line out. You could run it out the dock connector instead but I decided to go out the headphone jack – it loooked easier!

You’ll need a 4th gen ipod photo and a pair of Black Gate NX Hi-Q 6.3V 22uF or 47uF capacitors – they are rare and expensive. You can find them occasionally on ebay. They are no longer made but suppliers sell them off in pairs from time to time. My pair of 47uF caps cost me $16 pounds and I had to import them from the UK! Here’s a list of alternative caps you could try.

This is the ipod photo 4th Gen, it’s the color version of the 4th Gen ipod. Specs here:

Here’s my ipod open and Black Gates ready to go…

Step 1. Solder and heat shrink some small leads onto the black gate capacitors…

Step 1. Solder leads onto the black gate capacitors. I used wire wrap wire - strong but thin.

These are the resistors we will remove - they are tiny - about 1/4 the size of a grain of sugar. (This picture is magnified)

Step 3 - Solder one wire from each capacitor to the output of the DAC chip. (Click on image to enlarge)

Step 4. The other wire from the capacitor needs to be soldered to the headphone jack. The inductors closest to the headphone jack are removed.

Step 5 - shove it all back in and try not to break the wires! I had to remove the plastic sleeve around the dock connector to fit the capacitors in. The capacitors sit each side of the dock connector (bottom left).

Some tips:

I used a headphone lead to hold the socket while I soldered.

I used a 500W floodlight to help me see - the soldering is fine.

Actual size of resistors! I wouldn't attempt this mod unless you have had Surface Mount experience before...

Links:

This forum is a ripper – no step by step guide on the  4th gen ipod photo though!

This site has a summary of all imods.

Red wine do a mod for $250. It’s not that expensive considering the risk involved and fine soldering needed!

Mod finished – took about 1hr work plus 2hr research plus 1hr to write it up!

Bedtime and I’ll do some tests tomorrow!

For me the number one criteria for buying an iPod is audio quality. Some people will go for looks, size, or battery life, but for me it’s simply a matter of which iPod sounds the best – not just through the headphones but also into my stereo.

This article discusses the reasons for the difference in quality of the sound output of the various models of iPods and iPhones, which iPod sounds the best, and why.

Firstly, The Results:

First place goes to the 5.5th Gen iPod.

(Be careful not to confuse this with the 6th generation ipod called Apple iPod ‘Classic’ which looks almost identical. The 6th Gen has the aluminium front.)

First place: the 5th Gen ipod family including ipod 5th gen and 5th gen enhanced with plastic front case. A1136

Second place goes to the good old 4th Generation iPod family including iPod photo, iPod colour and U2 edition iPod.

Second place: The 4th Gen ipod family including ipod photo, ipod color and ipod U2 edition. A1059 and A1099.

Third place for best audio quality – the first generation Nano!

Third place: the 1st generation nano! A1137

Which iPod sounds the best?

Last holidays I was driving along listening to U2 on my iPhone 3GS. I wanted to change to a different song that was on my nano and instantly I noticed the sound quality was much better than on the iPhone. I have since done some side-by-side tests using the same song on the iPhone 3GS and the iPod nano and the iPod Nano definitely has better quality audio. It clearly has a better bass response and is not so harsh in the high-end. So not all iPods are same, this got me wondering why.

There are two main things that contribute to the sound quality of an ipod. One is the audio chip that is used, the  other are the components along the audio path from the audio chip to the headphone jack – a mixture of op-amps, capacitors, resistors and inductors.

The iPods I like the best seem to be those that use the Audio chips from the Scottish company Wolfson.  When I detected this difference I didn’t not know what a Wolfson chip was, but I could hear a difference and so I did some research. It turns out my Nano and 4G iPod (which I like) both have a Wolfson – the iPhone 3Gs does not.  All listening tests are personal – some people like huge bass, some like a warmth. I like clarity. I like to feel like I am there. I am also sensitive to any slight increase in the midrange or treble that will make the music sound  harsh – especially over long periods, and I like to hear the very low bass, I’m not a bass head who want’s it loud, but I want it to be there.

the best iPods are those with a Wolfson audio chip

Which iPods have a wolfson audio chip?

iPod 1G & 2G (WM8721), 3G (WM8731),  4G(WM8975),  5G  (WM87588G) and 5.5G (WM87588G)

iPod nano 1G (WM8975G), 2G (WM8975), 3G (WM1870)

iPod Touch 1G (WM8758BG) 

iPod mini (Wolfson 8731?)

iPhone (WM8758BG) and the iPhone 3G (WM6180).

In summary, all the early iPods up to 5G Classic used Wolfson chips.

Which iPods have a Cirrus Audio Chip?

ipod ‘Classic’ 1G , 2G & 3G  (CS42L55) (These are also known as 6th 7th and 8th gen iPod)

ipod nano 4G (CS42L58), 5G (CLI1480A), 6G (CLI1544C0)

iPod Touch 2G (possibly CS42L58)

iPhone 3GS (CS41L61) and 4(338S0589), 4S (338S0987)

iPod Shuffle 4th Gen (CLI1544C0)

Cirrus iPod vs Wolfson

Some people claim the Cirrus Audio Chips are better, but that’s not what I hear. Here is a great article by  Marc Heijligers who also noticed a decrease in sound quality with the 6th Gen iPod, and he explains why.  He writes “I noticed that the 6G sounds precise, crisp, but lacks 3D image and has an electronic haze to the sound. At first, this might sound like an improvement (crisp, detailed), but when listening more carefully and for longer times, it becomes fatiguing after a while. The 5G sounds less precise, but its timbre contains more harmonic information and sounds less electronic. For me, the 5G is closer to how I experience acoustic music in real life, and for me is the better sounding device overall.” He then goes on to do some measurements to back up his findings.

Of all the iPods that use the wolfson chips, the 5th generation iPods appear to be the best, followed by the 4th Generation iPods. Check out these comments by Vinne from Red Wine Audio. Red Wine Audio offer mods of the 4th gen and 5th gen iPods where they will replace the output section of the iPod with high quality Black Gate NX-Hi-Q capacitors. According to onheadphones.com the output audio quality rivals that of $1500 CD-players, with improved bass response and clear high end.  (There is an excellent forum here on how to do the mod yourself!)

The sound quality of course depends on more than just the chip that is used, so it’s not just about which chip is in the iPod. My Shuffle model A1204 (non-wolfson) sounds great, as does the iPhone 4S.  It’s rumoured  that with the iPhone 5 Apple will be returning to the Wolfson chips, but we’ll see!

If you want the best possible audio quality, try and get hold of one of the fifth generation iPods – model number A1136.  This includes the iPod 5G, iPod U2 5G, iPod 5th Gen enhanced and iPod 5th Gen with video. They sound great!

The Best

iPod 5G (wolfson WM8758)
iPod 4G (wolfson WM8975)
iPod nano 1G and 2G (wolfson 8975), iPhone 4S, (wolfson WM8758).

UPDATE: This article was first written in 2010, Apple keeps improving with every iPod released, but I think these results still stand.   Check out this thread for some other raves about the 5.5G iPod.  There will always be new models coming out – keep an eye on head-fi forums and so on for reviews.  Here some people prefer 7th gen (thin 160G) Classic  to 5.5th Gen.

I have an phone 4S and even though it doesn’t have a Wolfson chip it sounds incredible.  This test shows iPhone 4S has better specs the  iPod Classic 6G and better than iPad 2, but I can’t’ find any direct comparison with the 5.5G iPod.

Some Measurements:

Conclusion:

If you want good audio in an iPhone the current iPhones (4, 4S) are the best.

If you are after good audio in an iPod the older ones are the best. (especially the 4th and 5.5th Gen classic era)

Wolfson chip in an iPhone

RECORDING ON AN IPHONE

On a final note, here’s some frequency response graphs (note these are of a complete loop – recording AND playback so they include the frequency rolloff of the microphone.)  Look at how bad the low frequency roll-off is on the iPhone 3Gs. It’s -3dB (half the output power) at 200Hz – no wonder it sounds so thin. The iPhone 4 response is a slight improvement over the 3GS. Flat is good – so the original iPhone wins! 3G bad at high frequencies, 3GS bad at low. So for listening the original iPhone and the 4S  are the best, but the original iPhone is much better for recording. The 3GS is terrible.

iPhone frequency response from faber acoustical 1st: iPhone Last:iPhone3GS

Now don’t get me wrong – the iPods and iPhones are still great music players.  Comparing the iPhone with other phones is like comparing apples with oranges. Even the 3GS – the worst iPhone –  leaves most other phones for dead in terms of music quality. But comparing apples with apples, first prize goes to the 5th Generation iPod, with the 4G iPod a close second.

Of course if you want better than ipod quality you might try  5G or 4G with the red wine mod.

Other notes: Cambridge Audio and Harman Kardon use Wolfson DAC chips in their CD players. Pioneer, NAD and Onkyo use wolfson in some of their CD players. Marantz use Cirrus Range. It’s not just about the chip – the other audio components will make a difference too.

http://www.lampizator.eu/lampizator/REFERENCES/Cambridge%20Azur/Cambridge%20Audio%20Azur%20640C%20ALmpizator.html

http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-100139.html

http://www.vasiltech.nm.ru/files/cd-players/CD-Player-DAC-Transport.htm

I also did a version for the Optus D736 here and it seemed to work.  Here’s how I did it.

1. I downloaded a phone driver like this file.
2. I right clicked on the file and select ‘show package contents’.
3. I opened info.plist with a text editor like Textwrangler.
4. Where it says D900i I  changed it to the phone that I wanted to work. (If you do this you will have to use the proper official model name for the phone.)
5. I opened the folder called resources and opened the file called MetaClasses.plist
6. I did the same – changed the phone name.

I changed likes like this:

<key>com.apple.gmi+gmm</key>

<string>SAMSUNG+SAMSUNG SGH-D900</string>

and this:

<key>ModelName</key>

<string>D900</string>

<key>CompanyName</key>

<string>Samsung</string>

Note:

I started with a file closest to the one that I wanted to end up with. I wanted to write a driver for the samsung D900i mobile phone so I started with the driver for the Samsung D900 and modified it.

So if you were wanting to write a driver for say a Nokia or Motorola phone, you would  probably be better off to start with a driver for that phone and then modifying it.

This is a total hack, I didn’t really know what I was doing when I did it, but it just worked, and it didn’t seem to break anything. So use this at your own risk and I take no responsibility!

you