Apple Cult

[undrwater]

That's the one with the tube amp, yes? I was too young and poor to afford something like that. Ended up with NAD separates and infinity RS-somethings. Dual turntable with ortofon needle.

I still like my old McIntosh 1900, I don't use it anymore but I'll be damned if I can part with it.

 

[chillyinCanada]

Why would you want to put any effort into getting it? My wife can cook up a creamy chicken and mushroom soup in a reasonable amount of time that would make you wonder why you ever even thought of opening the can.

Well that's nice. Are you inviting me over for dinner?

 

[danvolker]

I used to be something of an audiophile. Not so much any more. I could quote all the numbers. After a house fire back in 78, I lost over 600 pieces of vinyl, an several pieces of electronics that would still rival what is available today. To this day I would defy anyone tries tell me that a CD is better than some of the first cut vinyl lps I owned to prove otherwise. You're barking up the wrong tree. I am not sold on the iTunes thing and still don't care if my phone is capable of whatever it is you seem to think is a selling point for the Galaxy or any other android phone. I still have the McIntosh 1900 receiver and the Thoren's turntable from then, they survived the fire. I just don't have the vinyl anymore. My point is that I really wouldn't want to think of a phone as being a part of a top end music system and I don't see a phone as being a key component of a system deserving of the quality of sound reproduction I would have if I had the $$$$ to do so. Maybe you would consider storing music on your phone for reproduction of sound, I don't, and I see no reason to depend on a $200 phone to make it happen. If I had the vinyl I lost I wouldn't even think of using a phone to depend on music reproduction. I would in fact view it as some kind of a joke.

Then as a former audiophile, this should get you excited....

See this..... Astell&Kern and click on the AK 10
If you read through this, you will see that this will provide output tough for an audiophile to distinguish from a big DAC....it has exceptional quality analog output....and...it talkes digital input from a smart phone....the reason to do this with an android, and NOT with an I phone, is that with the Android you can store and play 24 bit/ 96 Hz master recordings...the music you would want to collect with you for your whole life...
Imagine your building up exactly the collection of master recordings you wanted, for your awesome home stereo....You most likely will have a killer DAC taking in the 24 bit( masters) or 16 bit source( CD) and pushing this into your power amp(s).....The thing is, you copy this entire collection to your phone--identically....and no matter what happens to your home or your moving, or traveling, you always have all of your important collection--with you.

With the DAC you plug your phone into, the AK10, you can make a $20,000 stereo sound good, or a 3 thousand dollar stereo sound good...or a $1000 stereo....and this includes plugging in to the Line in on cars with Good car stereos....BMW's. ...AUDI's, etc. Even my Ford Raptor. Playing 24 bit, 96 hz into the Raptor DOES sound better than CD music....you pick up more transients---this being what is destroyed the most by the CD with it's slow 44 Hz sampling.....For others not exposed to the idea of transients before, the easiest way to demonstrate is with piano music....a really good stereo playing a 24 bit 96 ( or 192 Hz) master of a piano solo, in some room in a house.....and a person walking into your house will assume someone is playing the piano --for real....The vibrations in the sound of the piano--the fast transients, just get lost by a CD...so if your evil twin was in a similar house, with same stereo, but playing the same music from a CD....the guests in the house would know that they were hearing a stereo playing the piano....
Obviously, a great deal of music is changed by loss of the transients....though I doubt it would hurt rap or grundge, or heavy metal.....it's when detail makes a difference.
With the Android, you can have all of this, and have the safety and convenience of having a 2nd copy of your whole collection, with you for always.


Which brings me to a rant on why MP3's should be discontinued by everyone, and while we are at this, why I tunes is so defective with it's ties to mp3 /poor quality music.
Fortunately, there are about a half a dozen large sites that now sell 24 bit master format music, in all of the genre's...though they are heaviest in genre's not to poular with a general audience....but, this is changing. Neil Young just go hugely behind this with a big new Hi DEf Music direction. Sony is also about to unleash a huge new line of hi def music....Finally we might get back some of the music quality we enjoyed in the 70's.

 

[Diver0001]

HAHAHAHAHAHA

I have never had a problem with an apple product. I use PC stuff at work and continually have to call IT for support, to fix problems. I guess it is whatever you like.

I think it's kind of funny that if you were talking about a dive computer you would call it intuitive, if it is an iPhone you call it a cult.......

I should rephrase that I guess.

Apple definitely has something. My wife and daughter both have iPhones and my son has iPod and MacBook something-or-other that they made use buy for school because they went all paperless and standardized on Apple hardware.

If I look around my house I see a bigger investment in Apple "stuff" than most other "stuff"

2 iPhones, an iPod, a MacBook, two older iPods and one teenager who is moaning about wanting to replace a blackberry with an iPhone.

I will also admit that I was working for a company that gave me an iPhone last year but thankfully this year I have a new assignment and they gave me a Samsung, which is what my own telephone is too.

So yeah, we have some experience. It's not like I'm talking as a hater who has never tried it. On the positive side, I will say that the iPhone is the ONLY, and I mean the ONLY, electronic device that my wife has ever figured out for herself without asking a single question. You gotta hand it to Apple for that. If they can make a gizmo that even my wife understands then they have tapped into some level of extreme right-brained-ness that I have no chance of ever understanding.

On the flip side. I had to SMS them both the other week to say "DO NOT INSTALL THE NEW iOS update. YOU WILL HAVE NO WIFI AND APPLE'S SOLUTION IS TO DOWNLOAD THE UPDATE. WTF?"

My wife, thankfully never updates her iPhone. I do it for her. My daughter texted me back with "Already there. Friends told me and I know better than to update before I hear that it works... because... I'm smart-ish" (that was literally what she texted, I thought it was cute).

What she means is that a 15 year old is smart enough to know that you would be crazy to update an Apple before listening to the twitter about it.

I mean, I know other manufacturers have these kinds of problems too. I'm just saying that Apple is (a) not unique in this regard but (b) they seem to have problems during EVERY rollout..... which is a big surprise since they have 100% control over the hardware platform. Microsoft gets flack for this too but think about it. They roll out their OS onto 1000's or tens of thousands of different hardware configurations and still manage to keep problems limited to irritations. Apple has to roll out their OS on to ONE (count em) ONE hardware platform and the WiFi doesn't work.

I mean, you do the math.

As someone with a hard-core IT background, Apple doesn't impress me as a high tech company. Not one little bit. Their user interface is pure magic (evidently) and their marketing is without a doubt second to none, but if you want a gizmo that works... It's not what you want.

Anyway, that's my opinion.

R..

 

[Mike]

If people know they are being taped and believe the segment with them, if interesting, might be aired on some sort of t.v. program, a lot of people will 'perform' to make being used in the segment more likely. I'd think for something like this, the staff would do a number of 'man in the street' interviews, choose a few of those with highest entertainment value, and use them.

You could probably try this asking if 'the New Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup' was a drastic improvement over the old, while serving them the hold, and somebody would dramatically affirm that it was.

I have no idea what the current state of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup is and the example is hypothetical.

Richard.

I'd still laugh no matter what the product. Regardless of the product and regardless of the amount of people sampled and thrown away who didn't fit the comedy bit, the facts remain that the only ones who matter are the ones who fit the bit. If they would go out and couldn't find anybody to fit the bit, that is one thing, but the fact that they do is all that matters, those are the people that end up on the video. Now if they were actors, it's totally different but if they are real, no matter if they are 10 out of 100, or 10 out of 1000, those 10 still exist.

I like sirloin burger chunky soup

 

[danvolker]

I should rephrase that I guess.

Apple definitely has something. My wife and daughter both have iPhones and my son has iPod and MacBook something-or-other that they made use buy for school because they went all paperless and standardized on Apple hardware.

If I look around my house I see a bigger investment in Apple "stuff" than most other "stuff"

2 iPhones, an iPod, a MacBook, two older iPods and one teenager who is moaning about wanting to replace a blackberry with an iPhone.

I will also admit that I was working for a company that gave me an iPhone last year but thankfully this year I have a new assignment and they gave me a Samsung, which is what my own telephone is too.

So yeah, we have some experience. It's not like I'm talking as a hater who has never tried it. On the positive side, I will say that the iPhone is the ONLY, and I mean the ONLY, electronic device that my wife has ever figured out for herself without asking a single question. You gotta hand it to Apple for that. If they can make a gizmo that even my wife understands then they have tapped into some level of extreme right-brained-ness that I have no chance of ever understanding.

On the flip side. I had to SMS them both the other week to say "DO NOT INSTALL THE NEW iOS update. YOU WILL HAVE NO WIFI AND APPLE'S SOLUTION IS TO DOWNLOAD THE UPDATE. WTF?"

My wife, thankfully never updates her iPhone. I do it for her. My daughter texted me back with "Already there. Friends told me and I know better than to update before I hear that it works... because... I'm smart-ish" (that was literally what she texted, I thought it was cute).

What she means is that a 15 year old is smart enough to know that you would be crazy to update an Apple before listening to the twitter about it.

I mean, I know other manufacturers have these kinds of problems too. I'm just saying that Apple is (a) not unique in this regard but (b) they seem to have problems during EVERY rollout..... which is a big surprise since they have 100% control over the hardware platform. Microsoft gets flack for this too but think about it. They roll out their OS onto 1000's or tens of thousands of different hardware configurations and still manage to keep problems limited to irritations. Apple has to roll out their OS on to ONE (count em) ONE hardware platform and the WiFi doesn't work.

I mean, you do the math.

As someone with a hard-core IT background, Apple doesn't impress me as a high tech company. Not one little bit. Their user interface is pure magic (evidently) and their marketing is without a doubt second to none, but if you want a gizmo that works... It's not what you want.

Anyway, that's my opinion.

R..

As we look back to the 90's, the Mac users were frequently power users doing Adobe Photoshop and other computer intensive tasks, that PC's ( Windows machines), did a poorer job at....and the artists / creatives, loved Apple. This became almost a mantra, that if you were creative, you'd be a MAC user....If you used a PC, WHO WOULD BELIEVE YOU WERE CREATIVE ?

Fast forward to this year.

Go to a MAC store, and the "typical' Mac user does not know how to put RAM into their own Imac....and they go to the store for this simple assistance...the tech guys their are called "Geniuses"....and I hope this is a marketing idea to make the poorly educated/skilled mass market mac user, feel just fine that these guys know how to do something that they don't know how to do....Heaven forbid any consumer feels like they are uneducated or slow, because they can't do something.....( now keep in mind, these "geniuses" can be monkeys that have been taught to turn the lid on a can...)

And so Apple has decided that the best market for them, is to assume that the power user of old is too small a market to care about, and now all the new hardware and operating system "advancements", are aimed at mac users that don't really even know what ram is.....they are given few choices, because choices are scary....That's the new business model.

Meanwhile, If you want to use a "power program" like Adobe After Effects for video or still compositing, etc...the MAC is pathetically underpowered for this, as it cant even use the video cards made to run much of this with special GPU's in the video cards, and a PC can take a AE job that took a $4000 MAC 24 hours to render a 10 minute video.....with the PC utilizing the better architecture, it can do the job in one hour.....Try Ray Tracing and this gets exaggerated to several days for the Mac, versus a few hours for the PC. Big differences are involved just running Photoshop or Premiere, as well.

The Android phones allow a "power user" to do many things they might do on a real computer...and the Android is very much like a Linux computer...the typical I phone user won't even know what this means....Diver0001 will, but he is no longer the "target market" for apple. Androids give you lots of choices, I phones are aimed at people afraid of choices

 

[Wookie]

Wellp, I'm not an audiophile, and have no problems playing MP3 format through the boat speakers (with generators and air compressors pounding in the background) or in the F-250 diesel, the 2 places I listen to music, which is pretty much my entire life. I'm happy that someone somewhere is recreating music to 1970's technology, where not too many of us 50 year olds who went to AC/DC concerts in our youth can even hear the nuances of the 24 bit superwhamadyne multi-dubbed oversampled multi-track whatever. MP3 is good enough for me. Of course, I'm not an early adopter of anything. I still very happily run XP using paralells and don't allow it access to the internet.

We make a homemade pumpkin curry soup that will knock your socks off. I don't like curry, and I detest pumpkin, but I eat the heck out of this soup. Our Texas Jalapeno Corn Chowder ain't too shabby, either.

 

[Diver0001]

As we look back to the 90's, the Mac users were frequently power users doing Adobe Photoshop and other computer intensive tasks, that PC's ( Windows machines), did a poorer job at....and the artists / creatives, loved Apple. This became almost a mantra, that if you were creative, you'd be a MAC user....If you used a PC, WHO WOULD BELIEVE YOU WERE CREATIVE ?

This I can definitely follow. There does seem to be a level of "image" or "status" involved and I believe that Apple deserves a compliment for this because they handled that marketing very VERY well.

Initially, it was more than just marketing. My ex worked in a high-tech company that made one of the first mobile MRI scanners (don't actually know if the company succeeded or not) and all their hardware was apple. Why? Three reasons

1) the project had high stakes. If there was a hardware problem and both your hardware and your software were coming from the same supplier then you knew whose head you needed to swing the baseball bat at to get it working. With a Microsoft platform, the problem was that hardware, software, OEM's and middle men were all pointing at each other and stuff didn't get solved.... and they didn't have time for that sht. MANY high stakes projects standardized on Apple for this same reason.

2) At the time, Apple simply made the best screens. These days it's hard to imagine but in the late 80's early 90's it was hard to find a decent screen that wasn't an Apple. It's that simple.

3) Microsoft was still "learning". The Microsoft we have today isn't the same company it was in the 1980's/90's. At the time it was normal to need to reboot an Intel computer several times a day and there was a standard understanding that if it wasn't version 3 then it wasn't "production ripe". Apple didn't do that. They were much more perfectionistic. At the time, if they published a bit of software it worked. Period. Microsoft wanted to be the innovator but in their haste they gained a reputation for producing crap.

The situation today, however is reversed, although many people seem to miss it. Apple is not only behind the curve but their software QA is clearly sub-par. Most *average* IT companies have better QA these days.

The only bit of software they really spend time on is iOS and frankly, they'd be better off for the money they pump into it to outsource development to Microsoft. Because at least Microsoft, who spent years in the trenches learning how to get this right, can make an OS that is tested properly and works. I know Jobs didn't want to hear it but when Bill Gates characterized Microsoft as a software company and Apple as a hardware company, he hit the nail squarely on the head. Jobs' ego couldn't handle this but it's true. In Apple HQ they're still asking themselves what Steve would do and this coin has yet to fall..... Microsoft could save Apple from becoming the laughing stalk of the IT community but an AWFUL lot of crow will need to be eaten first.

R..

 

[DeepSeaExplorer]

I just got in two new iPhone 6s for the wife and I. I got mine setup last night and have been tinkering with it today. I'm not an Apple guy, but they're winning me over. There may be better phones out there, but one could argue that it's a 'System', not just a phone. Just like in diving, right? I have Apple TV on the way so I can watch my new GoPro videos on the widescreen TV, playing from either my PC or directly from the iPhone. This would be awesome stuff for instructing, BTW. An instructor could switch from instructional videos to personal in-water videos of students as a training aid. Not that all that can't be done with other manufacturer's equipment. It's just easier, more integrated with Apple. All this integration is a platform to build upon as well. Who doesn't hate that every camera had/has a different cable and software to download the videos/pictures. Now it just Wifi over to iTunes and you have it on every device: phone, PC, Laptop, iPad, TV, etc. Fifteen minutes after I got home, my first GoPro video was playing on my phone and laptop. To which my wife said, Wow, "I should have gone with you!" Which was exactly the response I was going for...

I've also got Apple Pay setup, and I'm working on home automation, which are going to be the next big things. I've already got a Wifi thermostat. It's awesome to be able to check the temperature and adjust the thermostat from the phone while 400 miles away in cave country. The future is integrating everything together, instead of independent devices. That's really where Apple is ahead, not the phone.

 

[danvolker]

I just got in two new iPhone 6s for the wife and I. I got mine setup last night and have been tinkering with it today. I'm not an Apple guy, but they're winning me over. There may be better phones out there, but one could argue that it's a 'System', not just a phone. Just like in diving, right? I have Apple TV on the way so I can watch my new GoPro videos on the widescreen TV, playing from either my PC or directly from the iPhone. This would be awesome stuff for instructing, BTW. An instructor could switch from instructional videos to personal in-water videos of students as a training aid. Not that all that can't be done with other manufacturer's equipment. It's just easier, more integrated with Apple. All this integration is a platform to build upon as well. Who doesn't hate that every camera had/has a different cable and software to download the videos/pictures. Now it just Wifi over to iTunes and you have it on every device: phone, PC, Laptop, iPad, TV, etc. Fifteen minutes after I got home, my first GoPro video was playing on my phone and laptop. To which my wife said, Wow, "I should have gone with you!" Which was exactly the response I was going for...

I've also got Apple Pay setup, and I'm working on home automation, which are going to be the next big things. I've already got a Wifi thermostat. It's awesome to be able to check the temperature and adjust the thermostat from the phone while 400 miles away in cave country. The future is integrating everything together, instead of independent devices. That's really where Apple is ahead, not the phone.

I see your point here.....As much as I love my Galaxy Note 2 for all it can do..and does....For me to stream music from or to my PC, I had to configure DLNA server settings...most PC users don't even know what these are ...so it is a pain for most. and DLNA, while powerful and much higher defination/audiophile than bluetooth audio( which is very lo-fi at best with low data rate/poor bandwidth for good audio)...DLNA requires a couple of hours for most Android or PC users to get it working...that's alot of committment...you have to want it badly


On the other hand, say I just shot a new goliath Grouper video like this one [video=youtube_share;qHFkQrPtlJM]http://youtu.be/qHFkQrPtlJM?list=UUsM5Za9Kc3DbP7Qo3-Zmz9w[/video]
The same 20 meg per second data rate and 2 gig mp4 video that I would have on my PC after rendering it for PC or Youtube Uploading, will play just like this on my android!!!!!
It plays just like a real computer.....My ipad, and Iphones ( as far as I know), require SPECIAL ENCODES RENDERED FOR THEM---for weaker cpu and lesser video player software in the IOS system....so, you have to waste time, often when you don't have it, making a special low res version of the video for the Apple phone or Ipad...I prefer the drag and drop, and be done