This is big. Although to be honest I'm still trying to understand how a company that sells quality stuff is buying the headphones that most audiophiles think is meh.
Is all this really just for the name?
Is all this really just for the name?
2. And aren't streaming rights only good for a few years anyway?
However, the response is pretty neutral. I'd imagine the Beats acquisition is probably at least in part to make better headphones. I don't know if Beats' streaming licenses are transferrable.
Since other products are all about the audio experience, it does seem strange that the iPod, the device which most of humanity uses to experience music, does such a poor job. And Apple doesn't care. And neither do the people listening. Strange.
I thought that was for making facetime and skype etc work well though? Musicians are not using the built-in audio interface, regardless of quality considerations, it lacks the necessary functionality.
Everyone I know has a sub $100 USB interface hanging off their machine and swears constantly at the latency and wishes they'd just stuck with ASIO on Windows...
Personally I still have a workstation...
As for the iPods they sound horrible. The latest line of nano has noticeable noise on the outputs.
USB interfaces are a terrible idea - they are polled and add latency every time.
You're complaining about WDM audio. There's built in WaveRT and external ASIO stacks as well. The latter has become the standard on Windows for professional audio and is direct hardware access.
USB audio devices are and aren't polled. The cheap ass speakers and stuff are but anything $20+ are buffered raw device access.
I can get 8ms out of a Windows 7 laptop with ASIO over USB that isn't even tuned. My Korg Triton Studio manages about 4ms and that's seriously high end kit.
WaveRT is what WDM uses, right? With the associated delays going user/kernel mode. How does that help?
And USB devices are polled, at three levels as I recall - 'control', 'interrupt' including 'isochronous' and 'bulk transfer'. The frame interval depends on the USB speed - and I see they are sub-millisecond. SO very adequate for audio sampling. I used to use it for serial protocols, and that frame rate was entirely inadequate for signalling so I formed my low opinion of USB at that time.