Sound card

[matt198992]

One of my major gripes with my Archos 101 is the sound quality. It sounds good and all, until you put on a good pair of headphones. I have the skullcandy skullcrushers (that amplify the bass), and when my ipod died one time, I tried using my tablet, to see just how they sound on there. The quality was OKAY, but my Ipod produces sound 10x better than my 101. I tried a regular pair of earphones and also noticed a sizeable difference.

So will the G9 tablet have the same sound card in it as the G8 tablets? Or can i expect a card at least equal to a 2-gen-old ipod?

[Chengbin]

What you are experiencing is absolutely abnormal. You shouldn't be able to hear such a large difference (in fact, you shouldn't hear a difference at all) with skullcandy earphones, especially on an iPod, which isn't a very good sounding device itself.

Have you tried with EQ? Maybe the EQ on your 101 is set really weird. Set it to flat. Maybe you set a EQ on your iPod (that boost treble and bass or something), and that's why you're hearing this.

I've had multiple very high quality earphones, and I can't hear any difference between my Archos 5 and an iPod.

If it is not EQ, I'm thinking your 101 is defective.

[matt198992]

It doesnt sound BAD, it just does not sound anywhere as good as my ipod nano. I will mess with it tonight after work, hopefully it is just an option, but i assumed that the 101 had a sub-par sound card in it. i LOVE the tablet, dont get me wrong. but i stopped trying to listen to music on it after i noticed how big of a difference there was.

[The_Blood_Raven]

One of my major gripes with my Archos 101 is the sound quality. It sounds good and all, until you put on a good pair of headphones. I have the skullcandy skull crushers (that amplify the bass), and when my ipod died one time, I tried using my tablet, to see just how they sound on there. The quality was OKAY, but my Ipod produces sound 10x better than my 101. I tried a regular pair of earphones and also noticed a sizeable difference.

So will the G9 tablet have the same sound card in it as the G8 tablets? Or can i expect a card at least equal to a 2-gen-old ipod?

Alright I'm going to say this in the most un-offending way I can think of. Your headphones are not very good. The sound quality from the Gen 8 devices is probably on par with that of the Apple, which is to say, just alright. This is coming from someone who has around $1000 in portable audio (in ear monitors, full sized headphones, and headphone amplifiers). To my farely well trained ear, they are farely close when it comes to reproduction and distortion, neither are exactly audiophile quality but they are far better than some phones and tablets I've heard.

Where the iPod might sound better to you, is the bass boost. Apple uses a pretty well tuned bass boost feature, where as with the Archos you only get a very limited digital equalizer.

Either way, sound quality comparisons are always difficult to do. I realize that your opinion is your opinion, but you have to also realize that your headphones are some of the most unnatural sounding headphones on the market. Put simply, they completely change the musical qualities because of their sloppy amplification of sound frequencies.

For a reference, these are the the Audio Technica M50, a farely neutral pair of headphones with a good amount of bass, compared to your headphones:
http://graphs.headphone.com/graphCompar ... hID[]=1263

As you can see your is nowhere even close to how the frequencies should be.

[matt198992]

And as i STATED, That was the one with the most noteable difference. There is also a significant difference when using earphones as well.

So every pair of headpones/earphones i have are crap because i do not have 1k$ equipment? I understand you have good quality headphones and all, but what exactly does that have to do with me? if i hear a difference between the two devices, something is wrong. if i hear a difference between the two using multiple pairs of headphones, something is wrong with the tablet. i do not see how you arrive at the conclusion "your headphones are bad"...

And it is not my "opinion" that i am hearing worse sound than my ipod. i am not saying "ARCHOS 101 SOUND CARD SUCKSZ", i am asking if anyone else notices a difference. what WOULD be an opinion is "your headphones are some of the most unnatural sounding headphones on the market".

i also realize that ipod does not have great sounding quality either, but if i am hearing worse with a tablet that "has an equal card", dont you think that is odd? there is not, and cannot be a problem with all 3 of my headphones and earphones. These are not tailored for an ipod specifically, and they sound great (all of them) on my computer as well, which has a good sound card.

And lastly, your graph link is broken. I also do not care that your headphones are better than my headphones. i do not need a graph to prove it and i believe you, but that is not what this topic is about.

as i said, i will download another media app when i get home, maybe it will help. i will also mess with the settings some and see if this is just a problem with the options.

[matt198992]

Hmm, all seems ok with sound quality now. I am using a different player and, after tweaking the default player, all sounds GREAT on my "unnatural" headphones =D.

Though i DO have one more gripe, though minor it may be.

I use a pair of skullcandy (do NOT comment on their quality blah blah blah, that isnt my question) earbuds that have a mic button on the left earphone. I don't have a phone that uses this, but i love these headphones because they sound great, i can use them at work, and the SINGLE button on the one headphone acts as complete audio control (minus volume) on my ipod. example: press it once to pause/resume, twice quickly to skip to next song, three times to go back, etc. My problem is that when i use these with my Archos tablet, they sound TERRIBLE, and after a bit of digging around last week, i noticed that when i hold the button on the earphone in, the sound is fine. but when i release the button, well... the music itself is fine, but for some reason the lyrics are muffled to the point of being completely erased from the song. Is this a hardware problem, or a software problem? I cannot find anything on google about this at all. It would just be nice not having to use a different pair of headphones for my tablet than i like to use with my ipod.

as i said, not a major issue, but something i AM curious about.

[The_Blood_Raven]

And as i STATED, That was the one with the most noteable difference. There is also a significant difference when using earphones as well.

So every pair of headpones/earphones i have are crap because i do not have 1k$ equipment? I understand you have good quality headphones and all, but what exactly does that have to do with me? if i hear a difference between the two devices, something is wrong. if i hear a difference between the two using multiple pairs of headphones, something is wrong with the tablet. i do not see how you arrive at the conclusion "your headphones are bad"...

And it is not my "opinion" that i am hearing worse sound than my ipod. i am not saying "ARCHOS 101 SOUND CARD SUCKSZ", i am asking if anyone else notices a difference. what WOULD be an opinion is "your headphones are some of the most unnatural sounding headphones on the market".

i also realize that ipod does not have great sounding quality either, but if i am hearing worse with a tablet that "has an equal card", dont you think that is odd? there is not, and cannot be a problem with all 3 of my headphones and earphones. These are not tailored for an ipod specifically, and they sound great (all of them) on my computer as well, which has a good sound card.

And lastly, your graph link is broken. I also do not care that your headphones are better than my headphones. i do not need a graph to prove it and i believe you, but that is not what this topic is about.

as i said, i will download another media app when i get home, maybe it will help. i will also mess with the settings some and see if this is just a problem with the options.

Reading comprehension is a great tool, I assure you. As I stated, the sound quality in comparison aren't very different, but the software is. And AS YOU FOUND OUT YOURSELF, this was the case. I don't care if you have no desire to upgrade or if you are happy with what you have. My point was that from a hardware level, the Archos 101 is not tangibly inferior. The whole reason I stated anything about your headphones, was so that you could realize that I have a much better reference when it comes to hardware defects, as far as sound goes.