Gadget Review: SRS iWow 3D Audio Enhancer for iPod, iPad and iPhone

In the search for better sound from portable devices, such as iPods, a number of add-ons (or plug-ins, literally) are available. There are several small headphone amps that you can use with an iPod or other portable music player, and then there’s the $70 SRS iWow 3D. This device plugs into the dock connector of your iPod, iPhone or iPad, and has a headphone jack for you to plug in your headphones or earbuds.

I tested the SRS iWow 3D on a number of devices, and with several different headphones. SRS claims that this device “Deliver[s] natural and immersive sound with deep, rich bass,” and that it “Dynamically locates and restores audio details buried in source material.” It does indeed change the sound of your music; the question is, is that change good or not? I think this type of device is something you will either love or hate, and that there’s not much middle ground.

First of all, the SRS iWow 3D does provide a feeling of surround sound, or what the company calls “immersive” sound. It’s actually quite impressive; there is a noticeable separation among instruments when it is on. While I wouldn’t call it surround sound – which SRS does not – it is more spacious. I don’t know exactly how this voodoo is worked, but some of it involves equalization and a change in overall volume. When you connect the SRS iWow 3D to your device, you press a small LED-lit button to turn it on; if the LED is off, it is merely passing the sound through without altering it. You can instantly notice that the volume is slightly increased, so to compare, you need to adjust the volume to try to hear both signals at the same loudness. The high end and low end are noticeably increased, and there is an overall augmentation of bass, something that portable players often lack.

In my tests with Beyerdynamic DT 990 32 amp headphones, I noticed a bit of hiss at the high end, with some types of music (this was more prominent with orchestral music than rock or pop); it seems that this treble boost is too much for some recordings. Jerry Garcia’s voice on Ripple sounds less smooth; the drums on U2′s Sunday Bloody Sunday are too punchy; and the bass on Brian Eno’s Just Another Day is almost distorted; and Bob Dylan’s voice on Desolation Row sounds processed and hissy.

On the other hand, when I plugged in a pair of Sennheiser PX 100-II i headphones, Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road sounded much better through the SRS iWow 3D; Lou Reed’s voice on Pale Blue Eyes stood out much more; and the acoustic guitar background on Bob Dylan’s Forever Young took on much more space.

(Note that most of my tests with classical music showed that the device, at least with good headphones, doesn’t help much.)

I performed the above tests first on an iPod classic. If you have an iOS device, you can use SRS’s iWow application to choose the type of output (headphones, speakers or car), and choose from advanced settings, such as Wide Surround, Deep Bass and High Treble. This gives you a bit more flexibility in the way the sound is rendered, and you can adjust these settings to fit your headphones. Results were a bit better using the device with the app.

My verdict is this: if you have good, relatively expensive headphones, the SRS iWow 3D won’t improve the sound of your music, and the adjustments it makes may not work with your headphones. However, if you use earbuds or portable headphones, notably with limited bass response, the SRS iWow 3D will give them a much better sound. Also, if you use an iOS device, the SRS iWow app will give you a bit more control over the sound.

This said, I think each listener will need to decide if they like the type of sound this device provides. You should ideally test this with your headphones to see how you feel about the sound.

One note: the LED on the device is bright, and, together with the actual signal processing, the SRS iWow 3D uses up a fair amount of battery life. SRS claims that this reduces battery life by approximately 18%. That’s a lot, if you use your iPod for several hours a day, and could be a deal-breaker.

Why The Economist Is so 20th Century

A few days ago, I ordered a subscription to The Economist, a British magazine (they oddly call it a “newspaper”) with a broad international coverage, and a generally balance point of view. (Though economically, they are to the right of center.) I had three choices: a print subscription to the dead-tree version of the magazine, and access to the web and iOS versions of the content, or a digital-only subscription. The digital-only subscription was only a pittance below the combined subscription, and since my wife would want to read the print version (I’m more interested in reading it on my iPad), I paid a dozen euros more for the print/digital subscription.

I was expecting to be able to start accessing the digital subscription right away; after all, they took my money right away. But when I looked into how I activated it, I found that I needed a print label to be able to activate my digital subscription.

Now, this is terribly antediluvian; to think that they cannot organize their database so the purchase of a subscription automatically activates digitally is very sad indeed. In fact, what do they do if you purchase a digital-only subscription? If they’re able to activate that, then why can’t they activate a combined subscription right away?

As an aside, I’ll note that, while I’ll get a year’s issues of The Economist in print, I’ll get somewhat less in digital, because of the time it takes to get my first issue. Since I’ve been billed already, and I’m not getting digital access, and it’ll take a few weeks to get the first issue, I don’t even know when my subscription period begins and ends.

I find it sad that a company with such a digital presence cannot manage something as simple as providing access to a paid subscriber when the subscription begins. While The Economist is at the forefront of digital distribution, with a well-thought-out iPad app, they’re back end is somewhat archaic. This behavior is something I would have expected back in the 20th century, but databases and web interfaces are advanced enough that it should be trivial for them to be able to activate subscriptions immediately.

Thoughts on the iPad-Only Newspaper The Daily

To much fanfare yesterday, The Daily was announced by Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp., together with Eddy Cue, Apple vice president of Internet services. This is the first iPad-only daily news organ, and it represents, apparently, some $30 million in investment.

The Daily states that it was “built from scratch for the iPad,” and it shows. It takes advantage of a number of iPad features, includes 360-degree photos, videos, and even games, to provide a truly unique form of information. At one point, a photo zooms out, at another point a tap on a photo plays a video report, and at yet another, a small box shows the latest tweets on a topic.

But for all these innovations, The Daily is a crappy newspaper with little real news. The first issue has a cover story about the demonstrations in Egypt, a story about the snowstorms in the US, and not much else in the way of news. Most of the rest of the paper is gossip, fashion pictures, horoscopes, an advice column, movie reviews and games. Okay, there are a couple of short editorials, but they’re stuck in between gossip and fashion, and don’t say much anyway. There’s a lot of attention to sports; notably to the Super Bowl, which, it so happens, is on News Corp.-owned Fox TV this coming Sunday.

The sports section is, in fact, the largest part of the first issue of The Daily, suggesting the type of audience the newspaper is targeting: those who don’t care about news. After all, one of the biggest stories of the year – the Egypt demonstrations, and the day that Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not seek reelection – gets a total of five pages, of which about one page is text. One other page talks about demonstrations in neighboring Arab countries. Then another page talks about Mubarak’s son and “trophy wife.” (That one is a three-page article with one page worth of text.)

Frankly, if you were to print all of this out, it would probably make a total of 6-8 pages of a New York Times-sized newspaper. Not much news for a buck.

So a lot of hoopla for news designed for people who don’t read news. The content of The Daily is roughly what you get in European cities for free: newspapers like 20 Minutes in France and other countries, distributed for free near subway stations and in city centers, offer more news than The Daily. They, too, contain very little serious news, and are designed, as the name suggests, to be read in 20 minutes. The Daily seems to be targeting people who think that Reader’s Digest is something worth reading. My guess is, though, that the people who spend what they do to buy an iPad are a bit more educated than those who would consider the content of The Daily to be worthwhile.

If you don’t have an iPad, you can see some screenshots of The Daily on the paper’s blog. This gives a good idea of the share of the paper that covers “real” news; as of this writing, only one of the screenshots shows a news story, while the rest cover the “meat” of the paper: ephemera.

But they got the interface right. I hope others will see what The Daily has been done and improve their own news apps. I would very much like to have a daily “paper” on my iPad, but it has to have real news, not this kind of crap.

Update: today’s second issue has a tad more news, but I counted 25 pages of sports, mostly about the Super Bowl (on Fox TV), and the gossip/fashion/lifestyle crap is nearly as much.

Kindle Ad Shows Better Reading in Sun: But What About in Darkness?

The new Kindle ad is clearly taking on the iPad, showing two people sitting by a pool, one with a reflective device (which isn’t actually an iPad), and the other with a Kindle. The latter, a curvacious young woman, is happy with her Kindle in the sun, but pool-dude-in-a-t-shirt isn’t so happy with his reflective device. So be it.

What they don’t say, though, is that if you’re not in the sun, reading a Kindle is much more difficult than reading an iPad. I’ll grant that the Kindle has some advantages: you can read in the sun, or under a bright light (in fact, you had better have very good lighting), and it’s lighter. But for all-around reading, unless you’re going to read by a pool or on the beach, the iPad wins out.

Here’s the Kindle ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGmRKSds9OY

Apple Updates iBooks: PDF Display Suffers

I use Apple’s iBooks on my iPad for reading epub books, and since PDF support was added, I’ve tried it out a few times. But the $0.99 GoodReader has so many more features, that I haven’t found it very useful to use iBooks for PDFs.

Apple has updated iBooks, claiming that there were improvements to PDF support. I tried a few PDFs in iBooks, and if this is improvement, Apple has become experts at newspeak. When moving from one page to another in a few PDFs, it takes about two seconds for the program to correctly render a page. At first, the text is visible but blurry, then it slowly snaps into the right display after those two seconds. GoodReader doesn’t have this problem, most likely because it pre-caches the pages so the rendering doesn’t take place when a new page is displayed.

I never really expected iBooks to be an ideal PDF reader, and it has very few of the many features that make GoodReader my tool of choice for reading PDFs. But this “downgrade” to iBooks is disappointing.

Apple Updates iBooks E-reader App

With the release of iOS 4 yesterday – the latest version of Apple’s operating system for the iPhone and iPod touch – Apple has also released an update to the iBooks app for iPad, and a version of that app for the smaller iDevices.

While the addition of iBooks to the iPhone and iPod touch is important – it levels the playing field with the Kindle, which has apps for such devices – there are a couple of interesting features in the new version of this app.

Apple added some new display options: First, you can choose to have text displayed justified (aligned on both the left and right of the column) or not. (To change this, go to the Settings app, tap on iBooks and make your choice.)

Next, the Georgia font is now available (I still prefer Palatino; Georgia is too cramped). Finally, there is a “sepia” display option. I’ve never liked this in practice, though I like the idea. The principle is that the background is beige (something I see as I type this in BBEdit; I’ve long used beige backgrounds for my text editors and terminal apps), but the fonts are reddish-brown. If the fonts were black, I’d be all for it; there’s less contrast, and in low-light situations, it would be easier to read. But the lack of contrast between the font and the background makes it pretty hard to read, defeating any advantage you get by the softer background.

The biggest change, however, is one of syncing your current location as you read. When you close a book, your device sends the location to a server, and the next time you open the book – on the same device, or on a different one – iBooks checks to find all your books’ locations. This bookmarking was, of course, the way you kept your place on one device before, but now you can switch devices and keep your place (as long as you have network access when you close a book). This matches what Amazon offers with its Kindle app and device.

Finally, the iBookstore now more clearly shows you that you can re-download books you’ve already purchased. Before, you’d see, in the Purchases section, a list of books, but the links would suggest that you had to buy the books again if you wanted to re-download them. Now they are marked Redownload (if they’re not on your device). Again, this aligns with the Kindle, which manages your library on its servers; you can now easily get to all the books you’ve bought, even if you don’t save them on your computer in iTunes.

All in all, these are nice improvements for an app that’s already changing the market: both the Nook and Kindle announced lower prices yesterday, in part, I believed, because the iPad and now Apple’s other devices are providing stiff competition to them.

Are iBooks Books Complete? I Bought One Missing Nearly 100 Pages

I’ve been wanting to re-read Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and decided to buy the books to read on my iPad (I already have paperback versions), to benefit from the larger font size. I’m currently near the end of the third book, when I noticed that something was missing. At the end of part III, there’s a section that seemed to not be there. I looked it up in my paperback, and, indeed, pages 459-548 are missing from the ebook edition.

I’m writing to Apple to get a refund (which I’m sure they’ll issue right away; they are pretty good about doing so for any music problems), but I’m somewhat worried about the overall integrity of these ebooks. If I hadn’t read the book before, I might not have noticed the missing part. Sure, there’s a hiccup, but one could assume that it was just glossed over.

So can one assume that ebooks purchased from Apple – or from any other vendor, for that matter – are complete? I’ve seen comments that many of them have editing issues, and I indeed found this to be the case for a Penguin ebook I bought from Amazon.

This is disturbing; are publishers really not performing quality checks for ebooks? In this case, nearly 1/6 of the book is missing; the length of the file should have been checked.

It’s worth noting that this particular book has been the object of several “reviews” in the iBookstore mentioning the glitch (I bought the book before these reviews were posted), some of which mention having contacted Apple. That Apple is still selling the book is at a minimum disturbing.

UPDATE: Apple customer service had me re-download the book. It’s the same. They didn’t seem to understand that it wasn’t a faulty download, but rather a problem with the actual book file that they are peddling. This leads to a problem: since customer service reps probably can’t escalate this type of problem to those who can take care of it, these issues may take a long time to be resolved.

UDATE 2: Apple has replied (much more quickly this time) to my follow-up e-mail, saying:

“I’m sorry to hear that the new copy of “The Waste Lands” is also missing the same section as the first copy. I am sure you were looking forward to reading the entire book and I would be more than happy to assist you with your refund request.

“I have reversed the charge for this iBook. In three to five business days, a credit of $6.99 should be posted to the credit card that appears on the receipt for that purchase.

“I have also submitted this item for investigation. Apple takes the quality of the items offered on the iTunes Store seriously and will investigate the issue with this item, but I can’t say when or if the issue will be resolved. Please try again in a few weeks if you would like.”

Note the “when and if” part, which suggests that this will never be fixed…

Ulysses Gets Censored Again; This Time by Apple

Apple’s strategy of censoring apps that contains content unsuitable for children is certainly defensible, but sometimes the results are ludicrous. A comic adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses was denied approval until the developer and artist made some changes, notably reframing the image below:

Come on, Apple, even the famous court decision overturning its censorship in the US made things pretty clear:

[W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.

This is really sad; Apple censoring a comic of one of the English language’s greatest novels, while still, fortunately, allowing that novel to be sold in ebook format via its iBookstore. Apple has set standards that are very difficult to enforce, and should really rethink the kind of stupidity they are leading to. Keep out porn, sure, but provide a parental control system so things such as this comic – and its subsequent episodes – can be distributed. The future of a lot of creative content is at stake here; Apple shouldn’t be the one arbitrarily deciding that a comic of a great novel is obscene just because there’s a penis in it.

In any case, the entire work – including all of the supporting information, which will be of help to any reader of Ulysses, is available on the web. And, by the way, the iPad app is free, so grab that too!