Bass and treble

For some reason I started wondering today why home stereos come with bass and treble knobs (or sometimes full EQ settings).

Musicians spend a lot of time getting their sound just right. And then an audio engineer spends a lot of time making sure the record sounds just right. The engineer tests the sound on a variety of speakers. Sometimes they'll even test on a crappy hand-held stereo because of times thats what radio execs will hear the CD on in between meetings. In the end they have a finely tuned piece of audio, with each frequency meticulously set.

And then someone buys it, goes home, and plays it on their stereo with the bass and treble knobs turned to some bizarre value.

I guess it's because of two things: 1) Home speakers are usually cheap, and all the effort the audio engineer puts into the tuning of the sound doesn''t matter because the home system won't do it justice anyway. 2) Everyone just likes different sounds. Some people love low end, some people high end.

In a way, I guess it's similar to food. The chef might create a masterpiece, then the customer might cover it in salt to suit their own taste. And the same goes for film colors. The director may work for days with the art director and the film guys to develop the film just right, only to have it played back on a DVD with the colors on the TV set all wrong.

I guess unless you have your audio or video set the way the original author had theirs set, you really aren't enjoying the experience as the artist intended.

Replacing an iPod battery

It's fairly well known know that iPod batteries lose a lot of their life after about two years (it is well known thanks to campaigns like this one - though this problem is not unique to iPods, all rechargeable batteries have this issue). My wife's iPod was starting to have this issue, and it was becoming very unpredictable to tell how long a charge would last.

So I went to the apple store, and was given 3 options:

• If I had "apple care" it would be under warranty or something. I don't have apple care.
  
• I could pay $70 for them to replace the battery.
  
• I could have them recycle the iPod in exchange for 10% off a new iPod (which starts at $149).
  

None of these options seemed ideal to me. So instead I went online to ipodbattery.com and paid $16 for a new battery that I could install myself. It arrived in the mail today, and I installed it in about 5 minutes. It's charging now, and we'll find out later this week whether it works out or not.

The main problem is that Apple designed the iPod to be pretty much disposable - there's no easy way to open the iPod up to replace the battery or other parts. In fact, one of the pieces you have to remove is held together by glue, so I'm guessing that when they replace batteries at the apple store they might actually have to reglue it back on (though it's sticky enough to put the part back on again without glue). Taking the iPod apart scratches it up a lot, so I don't recommend doing it if you will be upset by a few dings on your iPod. And of course it voids your warranty. But my warranty was void anyway, and $16 seemed a lot better than $70...

Anyway, I'm confused as to why Apple made iPod so hard to take apart. I guess they just want people to buy new iPods every 2 years...

Hopefully this battery lasts for awhile.