I was all geared up to write a flaming post about the shit audio quality of music playback on the iPhone, and how it must have been an afterthought in the design process, etc. Due to the wonderful design of that bloody recessed headphone jack, my favourite headphones just wouldn’t fit. Nice one, Apple. So I tried the included headphones for about 5 minutes and just about every EQ setting would cause the audio to distort, even at low volumes. Even with “sound check” activated, which is supposed to make your songs play back with similar RMS volume. It’s a bit of a lame feature – when you start playing a loud track you get a few milliseconds of OMGLOUD before it kicks in. But I digress.
In desperation I bought an adaptor off eBay supposedly designed to act as a proxy for the obese plugs so they fit into the iPhone but it’s a piece of shit. It uses that “3 bands” 3.5mm plug – same as on the iPhone headphones. It’s hard to describe but the adaptor caused the sound to be biased to the right speaker, sounding like it wasn’t plugged in all the way, even when it was. I swear there was some shorting going on. By this stage I was feeling quite ripped off, and pissed off. But then a gleaming beam of hope…
It’s not the iPhone! It’s those frickin tits-on-a-bull headphones! Excuse me while I go and place them in the round filing cabinet. Today I hacked up the adaptor to use a standard 3.5mm stereo plug. I plugged in my $75 Sony “suction bass” headphones and almost died at the difference in audio quality. Now I can use *every* EQ preset with almost no distortion (some of the EQ’s are a bit excessive, regardless of your headphones). For now I’ve settled on “Bass Booster”.
