why is the sound so bad?

[lifeisogood]

Hi,
I've been using rockbox on ihp-120 earlier, and the sound used to be superb with equalizer
i sold it two days ago  

Now i try to use rockbox with ipod 5.5 30gb and the sound is so bad!
If i raise bass, instead volume raises
and the sound is even flatter than original ipod's firmware.

  really want old good rockbox work on ipod, please help

[bluebrother]

Well, I'm just guessing, but from a direct comparison between h120 and ipod mini I noticed the iriver being _much_ better in terms of sound quality. So my guess it's simply the hardware is much inferior on the ipods.

[Llorean]

As for the "sound is even flatter than the original ipod's firmware", do you have any objective comparison? I don't believe there's any testing so far that has suggested Rockbox's sound output, with flat equalizers, is wrong.

[lifeisogood]

ok,
as I said i tried to raise some bass, but i noticed that the music just became louder, not the bass itself,

ipod's firmware has so little of bass,

ihp-120 used to have great bass with rockbox,
but on my ipod with rockbox, the bass is worse than original firmware's bass,

As for the "sound is even flatter than the original ipod's firmware", do you have any objective comparison?

middle's and high's are ok enough, though the highs are not very clear.

it just doesn't feel right,

what's wrong???
could it be because of 5.5 ?

[Llorean]

"It just doesn't feel right" is not objective comparison. Could you run an RMAA or something?

As well, the "Bass/Treble" settings on the 5.5G are nearly useless, try using the Software Equalizer

[lifeisogood]

are there any suggested settings for EQ,
i'm not really familiar with RMAA,

if i use software equalizer and raise bass, distortion appears,

i think i'm giving up with rockbox  

[Llorean]

Did you lower the preamp to counter the increased bass from the equalizer?

[soap]

lifeisogood, I am very willing to bet you are using headphones will less than 32ohms impedance.
iPods have a history of poor bass response with low impedance loads.  You can correct this with one well tuned EQ filter.  Search the forums as this has been done before.

Other than that - they RMAA out as good if not better than other players on the market.

[saratoga]

Well, I'm just guessing, but from a direct comparison between h120 and ipod mini I noticed the iriver being _much_ better in terms of sound quality. So my guess it's simply the hardware is much inferior on the ipods.

The RMAA results for the H100 and Ipod 5G/Mini favor the Ipod, although if very low impedance headphones are used, the Ipods base response dips harder then the h100.

[Febs]

For bass boost on the iPod Video, use the low shelf of the Hardware Equalizer rather than the bass control or the software equalizer.  As noted above, the bass control is not properly implemented.  While the software equalizer works fine if you compensate with the pre-cut for any gain you add through the equalizer, the hardware equalizer is a better choice because, unlike the software equalizer, it does not use any additional CPU.