Sound quality placebo effect?

[Binky]

I know the pandora's audio hardware is carefully designed and all, but this has really puzzled me:


When playing a 240p youtube vid through sucky unbranded £10 earbuds on my pandora, it sounds noticeably better than on my generic pentium4 box playing though acceptably bad speakers.


Are there any sound engineers around who can explain how this works?


I thought that if the recording is rubbish, and the speakers are rubbish, the SQ will be no good.


If it matters, the I was listening to this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcSV377wxf4

at the time

 

[TrashyMG]

Well it's most likely that the compression / quality of the youtube video is better on a desktop with a consistent internet connection and has hardware supported decompression and acceleration.


Since streaming videos can on the fly vary the quality of video and sound.. best comparison would be is to have the same audio file play on both the Pandora and your aging desktop.

 

[_wb_]

Youtube also tends to have its movies available in different file formats, so it could very well be the case that you're not even playing back the same file. It's possible that your desktop uses a file with more compression artifacts (because of transcoding).


Other than that: earbuds/headphones, even cheap ones, tend to give a better sound quality than speakers, especially cheap ones. The stereo will always have better separation with earbuds/headphones, and you want your sound to travel mostly through cables, not mostly through the air

 

[sswam]

normally crap audio sounds WORSE with good kit, because it brings out all the defects into sharp relief

meanwhile, check this out, awesome quote of the day:

"The Pandora absolutely smoked the Dragonfly ..."

http://www.head-fi.org/t/629592/the-open-pandora-an-ultimate-portable-player/345#post_9132280