Author

9to5 Staff

iOS Devices

Battling iPhone's GSM Buzz 2: Klipsch is a Turkey

9to5 Staff Jan 26 2008 - 10:49 am PT

Edit: This is the second in a series of four articles on Battling iPhone’s GSM Buzz. A solution to this issue is described in the fourth installment.

Oh, how I regret returning my M-Audio Studio Pro 3 Desktop monitors now.

This anonymous coward said:

I have Klipsch desktop speakers within 6" of my docked iPhone. Never a pop, click, hum, or buzz. (They sound great, too.)

This just goes to prove my theory that positive user reviews are always skewed. It’s natural that people want to give a favorable impression of the product they bought because they don’t want to feel like the fool who got taken in. I’m sorry, A.C., but the Klipsch have nothing on the M-Audio monitors. I’m listening to them as I write this, and later today, I’ll be boxing them up and returning them to Amazon too.

The high end is tinny and sharp and the bass is overwhelming, and unlike the M-Audios, there is no midrange. Those nuances that I heard for the first time with the M-Audios all disappeared in the Klipsch pair. I’m glad I tried the M-Audios first because I never would have known what I was missing.

And the Klipsch pair are not very loud at the limit. While the sound quality isn’t great on my cheapo pair of Logitech speakers, at least you can hear them clearly in the next room–they were even louder than the M-Audios, but the M-Audios made up for lower volume with better detail.

Another beef–the Klipsch pair have a large brick that is hardwired to the power cord. I really don’t like extra clutter under my desk…

But the worst thing about the Klipsch Groove PM20 2.0 Speaker System is the GSM buzz. I had my iPhone docked when I installed the speakers. I plugged the speaker cable into my sound card and then plugged the speakers into my surge protector. I immediately got the dreaded "bup, bup ba dup, bup ba dup, bup ba dup, bzzzzzzzzzzz" that I have heard in every 2.0 speaker set I’ve tried so far. And the buzz was louder, shriller, more constant, and way more annoying than with the M-Audio monitors.

2.0 Speaker	Logitech R-10	M-Audio Studio Pro 3	Klipsch Groove PM 20
cost	$17.02	$89.28	$96.06
GSM Buzz	bad	moderate	bad
Sound quality (out of 10)	5	8.5	6
Diminishing returns, anyone?

As an aside, I want to point out that I often charge my iPhone with my old iPod firewire cable on the interim computer I’m using at work, which is an Intel iMac. The built-in iMac speakers have never had interference of any kind, and I’m pretty sure that’s because of the lack of external cables. I mentioned in the comments of the other piece that I did, in fact, purchase ferrite cores at Radioshack for the speaker cables, and they failed to prevent GSM buzz at all. I tried the two kinds of cores available at RS in multiple configurations, and nothing worked, so I returned them too.

Will I be repurchasing the M-Audio pair? No. As good as the sound was, they still didn’t live up to the reason I was shopping for new computer speakers in the first place: to overcome the GSM buzz from my docked iPhone. Anonymous Jim claims he has no GSM buzz with his USB connected speakers, and I’m interested to hear other people’s impressions of that interface.

I’m not sure a lot of speaker manufacturers are going to scramble to fix this issue because the inevitable solution is the ascendancy of UMTS and the death of GSM. Perhaps we should focus our disappointment on Apple, for rushing this phone to market on an inferior network. I personally doubt there will be any UMTS/3G iPhone for another four and a half years, until the initial contract with the Death Star is over, but I’ve been wrong before. Discuss amongst yourselves.

iOS Devices

Mossberg video on MacBook Air

9to5 Staff Jan 26 2008 - 9:36 am PT

Author

9to5 Staff

The Computers:

• The MacBook Air has a 1.6 GHz custom Intel processor, 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 RAM, and an 80 GB, 1.8", 4200 RPM HDD.

• The MacBook (a generation old) has a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 RAM, and a 120 GB, 2.5", 5400 HDD.

• The MacBook Pro (also a generation old) has a 2.2 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 RAM, and a custom 160 GB, 2.5", 5400 RPM, Seagate Momentus HDD.

The Tests:

• For the MP3 Encoding, we used iTunes and Seu Jorge’s album Cru, which is 46 minutes long. We set up custom import settings, which were 192 kbps VBR, set at high quality.

• The Video Conversion test was done using a trailer for 300 that was 1:46 in length and 73 MB (.mov). We converted using the export option in Quicktime 7.4 that used the iPhone export preset.

• The Thumbdrive to MacBook file transfer test was done using an 803 MB .zip file and a 2GB Lexar Lightning Thumbdrive (30 MB/s read, 21 MB/s write).

• The File Duplication test was done on the Lexar thumbdrive using the same zip file used in the previous test.

As always, we are amazon affiliates and get credit when you buy products from our site.