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iMic = YES
Now I am no audiophile by any stretch of the imagination. My only claim to aduio expertise is that I've owned a lot of audio equipment, which I have sold and consolidated into a single PowerMac with iTunes and output to a pair of analog harman/kardon soundsticks w/jellyfish subwoofer. (Yes, I actually sold my entire CD collection in 2004 after scanning the cover art and ripping all the music at high quality to liberate my bookshelves and have a larger "randomizeable" playlist)
I listen to music from my collection, streamed from neighbors apartments, and from internet radio. Music is playing from every conceivable genre about 10 hours a day from my home office.
Until recently I thought the setup sounded pretty good to my ears. This is until I talked myself into buying Griffin's iMic. Immediately after plugging it in and resuming the song I was playing I finally understood what people mean when they talk about a "sound stage" as I had just gotten one free with my purchase.
At the same volume settings the playback was louder, and there was much better separation between the highs and the lows. There was more full bass, filling the room instead of feeling like a directional speaker. There were also frequencies I seemed to be hearing that I wasn't before -- kind of like there were gaps in the spectrum that were now filled in. In short, my music came alive.
For some it will seem a little pricey for a device that let's you do the same thing you've already been doing (sound in/out) but it is true that it's a lot cheaper then almost any other audio device that does the same thing and I'm sure you'll notice the difference.
TECHNICAL NOTE: On a generously equipped and recently patched PowerMac G4 QuickSilver there are very real performance issues using the iMic with the internal (USB 1) ports. Music playback is steady for just under a half minute before it "skips". I am not sure if this is a software issue or a bandwidth limitation of USB 1, but there are absolutely no problems using it with a USB2 PCI card.
Posted by Aaron R. Deutsch on March 24, 2006 11:09 AM