Steve Jobs was an audiophile

he looks like he was 22 or so at the moment the pic was taken. No audiophile starts out with a top notch positioned system in an acoustic treated chamber, like the one he had since the 90ies - He called them his 'decompression chamber' - he escaped there whenever possible to relieve some stress... wonder what will happen to that awesome SPECTRAL WILSON set-up ?

If that ends up as an auction for charity it will fetch serious money..
I think when he let go that 19 grand (US / 12.000 Euro) Spectral Reference CD Player for free as got the latest model he knew this would be his last piece of audio equipment and sadly only for a few weeks and somehow wanted to make sure this nice machine would find "a good home".
Call me old fashioned - but I think that is actually pretty touching if you think a bit about it.. I mean even for a billionaire a sum like that is not small change, he don't care about.
It was the first time he did that, too...

 

He was a fascinating guy for sure, and the Isaacson book is a thought provoking book about Steve and all of the different forms that creativity can take.

It also mentions that in the lobby/atrium for his small macintosh team offices along with arcade games they had a CD based stereo system with Martin Logan speakers.

 

No, seriously, he didn't have furniture until the early 90's. First decision: the system. Everything else could wait until the new wife forced him to buy furniture. 12 or so years later.

In other words, a true audiophile.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/neil-young-steve-jobs-listened-vinyl-195910565.html


Hi-Rez for the masses? Unthinkable!

 

I think what Neil Young was talking about was lossless 44.1/24

 

Although I certainly love the ideas presented here, it's just not feasible. Primarily because the majority of consumers are quite content with MP3's and AAC's, and I'm sure the music industry is very happy to sell them as-is now so they can re-sell them at a higher bitrate later (like 24/44 or 24/48 though - you think they'll jump right into 24/192?). Neil is a dreamer, but not a realist. And this is definitely a situation where I hope to be proved wrong.

What's he going to do, drive his Caddy to every home in America?

A better solution is to improve earbud SQ on iPods - that way people can start to hear what they've been missing. Try to get Yuin or Sennheiser in bed on this to improve the standard iPod earbud. And also get at least 24/96 support enabled in the firmware on new devices, to prepare for the future.

 

Very difficult for me to accept this in view of all the astonishing advances I have witnessed in the past decade or two. It may not be feasible now, but give us a few weeks...

Downloading and storing large files is not the sort of problem that strikes me as insurmountable...speeds and storage capacity just keep improving almost daily. What's considered a large file today will be the norm before you know it.

 

Actually storage and speeds are still a big problem. Part of a lossy file's appeal to Joe Consumer is that it's fast to stream, fast to download and fairly easy to store - be it locally on your iPhone, on a media server, or in a "Cloud" service like iTunes Match or Google Music or Amazon.

I actually think we've taken a step backwards, at least in the States, because of the increase in cell phone data plan users. All you have to do is head over to the Apple boards to hear all the complaints on iTunes Match, for example, and how it's trashing people's monthly data plans. And these are 256kps lossy files - imagine if it was 24/96 lossless?

The other step backwards was the move to flash-based storage on devices like the iPod Touch. At one point it looked like 120+GB HDD based players were becoming the norm, but the masses wanted smaller device size versus storage space, and the vendor's listened. The iPod Classic hasn't been updated in years. It might be a year or two before we see 120GB flash-based devices catch up.

My guess it that we'll see 48khz lossy AAC's become a standard before we see lossless 24/48 or 24/96. Again, I hope I'm wrong about this.

 

I will defer to your better understanding of the specifics. But five years from now, I sure will be surprised if I find that most electronic devices and delivery networks have not become better, stronger, faster...

 

Strange discussion. Earbuds?

As mentioned above, Jobs listened to vinyl. He had various serious audiophile systems through the years - chronicled by various sources. And stayed serious to the end. His bootleg tape collection was legendary.

 

There's no question he was a music lover, and would have fit it well in this forum. Even his famous nastiness would probably make him seem like several of the regulars here

 

I can't stand arguments made out of hyperbole. Even low-bitrate MP3 and AAC files contain more than 5% of the original audio data.

 

Using percentages when it comes to audio quality doesn't make sense anyway, except for silly marketing.

A 24/96 file is 3 times the size of a 16/44 file, but most people only hear a marginal improvement in sound quality (at best), and even audiophiles wouldn't say a 24/96 DVD-A sounds 3 times better than a CD.

 

What of it ? I doubt that the owners of McDonalds eat exclusively in their own restaurants ......

 

ya think?

 

http://www.spectralaudio.com/ reference CD Player/DAC 400.
The last audio component Steve bought. He returned his older 300 model for free to the company owner and told him 'find it it a good home'..
So he was NOT analog only - even into sound differences from digital cables.
I have no clue what NY is talking about - 24/192 is not enough ?
32/384 or a brand new format ?
Fact is that 24/192 is studio standard for a while now, so making files bigger is not the solution imo.

 

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/steve-jobs-stereo-system/#x

 

Yes, Steve was a minimalist. He definitely had some quirks.
When he first took over Apple (er, re-took) he would not use a Mac - he used a Thinkpad running NeXT for several years until OS X was ready.

He had a fascination with certain shapes and an obsession that the mouse pointer should be an extension of the finger to the point that he refused to acknowledge the functional practicality of multi-button mice.

I would not be surprised if he had a listening room somewhere but had a minimalist compact stereo as well. It also wouldn't surprise me if a fancier stereo system wasn't creatively hidden so that a functional compact system is all that was seen.

I doubt he was an audiophile the way many of us view audiophile, which is different than someone who enjoys quality playback equipment. But that's a semantic argument.

 

Oh, and the reason for the white earbuds was marketing value. You saw white earbuds, you knew an iPod was in use.