dead sun's Journal: You call that Hi-Fi?!

Okay, curious about the new little intel mac mini, I figured I'd stop in and listen to one being put through its paces. I again have decided that the background noise in the store is too loud to make much of a call, but it seemed pretty quiet. I may have to wait until my coworker inevitably purchases one to tell in a quiet room though.

Of peculiar interest though, was this little box of speakers Apple refers to as the Hi-Fi. Now, I'll grant I'm overly picky, but this goes a little beyond what I can dismiss as marketing and into the bold faced lies category. There is nothing about that box of tinny (yes, tin-like in quality, not small) little speakers that is remotely Hi-Fi. There were several playing at different locations in the store. The music exiting all of them was weak, hollow, and worst of all, bleeding and distorted. I actually cringed.

The weak and hollow I can possibly write off as a small set of speakers trying to fill too big a space. The Apple store is open and quite large. It isn't something that inspires confidence in me, but I could accept that in a smallish room it could possibly do okay.

The bleeding and distortion? That's hard to dismiss. Maybe the poor thing was just cranked to maximum volume and the speakers couldn't handle it. Maybe the source music they were playing was poorly encoded. I don't know, but it didn't sound like anything I want to listen to. That was seriously terrible.

That thing doesn't approach Hi-Fi. I wonder how many Apple execs would actually consider owning one.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:The encoding

[dead sun]

Whatever the problem was, in my opinion they weren't doing a very good job of promoting it by letting it sound like that in the store. Thinking it over further, it's probably a mix between the large, open space and pushing volumes higher than the speakers should be used at. The distortion didn't sound so much like encoding problems as it was like when you turn a low to mid-end bookshelf stereo up too high. Just sort of all the notes bleeding together into one ugly mix. It probably sounds better at lower vol

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[account_deleted]

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Re:The encoding

[dead sun]

Like I said, it's just somewhat surprising, as whatever speakers they usually use in the store sound just fine. I know those are the professional install sorts of things, but damn, the Hi-Fi just sounded awful. There's just no way for it to fill that space. They should just turn it down and let it sound flat, instead of flat and distorted.

And looking at Apple's site for specs, with a frequency respone of 53Hz-16kHz, there isn't a chance in hell that Jobs would actually ditch a stereo of the caliber he coul

How much were they selling for?

[lab16]

When putting money into speakers, I've usually looked for things like "thx" instead of hi-fi. Usually alot more expensive, but you get what you pay for (unless the seller is out to rip you off, of course).

what kinds of tests did you run on the mini?

[artifex2004]

I'd like to know how it does at decoding h.264 at various resolutions, etc. My PPC mini doesn't do better than 480p, it seems. At least not without making the bitrate low, etc.

Re:what kinds of tests did you run on the mini?

[dead sun]

Sadly I only got to play a bit with the core solo, as somebody was hogging the core duo machine. I opened up the HD movie maker and basically just tried to get it to use up all the available processing power to get the cooling fan to come on, as that's one of my primary concerns. It did much better than the G4 mini I'd played with prior, which just sat and sputtered. As for all the settings, I couldn't tell you, sorry. It wasn't noticably dropping frames on playback, but again, I wasn't paying that much att