Andrew Gormley

I have a low tolerance for bullshit, especially when it comes to gimmicks that claim to improve the quality of things. Take, for instance, music files that you transcode from CD.  Obviously, to get the best quality you would select the lossless option in your encoder, but not all of us have the hard drive space required to maintain a lossless music library so we opt for the lossy route in the form of either MP3 or AAC files.†

I’m a bit of an audiophile, but I don’t require my MP3 collection to be ripped at 320kbps CBR because I understand the law of diminishing returns.  In fact, in the tradition of the late, great OiNK I generally opt to encode my MP3s using the V0 option in EAC (which is roughly 256kbps VBR). I understand from the start that I’m going to lose a bit of fidelity in the music, primarily in the highs and the lows and I accept that because I know the intricacies of the encoding process.  So you can understand me being a bit skeptical when I see these audio plugins come along promising to enhance the audio quality. My primary argument being that you can’t enhance the sound that isn’t there (ie: the highs and lows that have been cut in the encoding process). 

The iWow Plugin Interface

I recently sat down with the iWow plugin for iTunes from SRS Labs.  You might’ve seen their logo around, sometimes in the form of audio processing on receivers and mid-to-high range televisions.  Here’s text pulled directly from their site describing what the plugin does:

Patented solutions in iWOW Premium greatly improve the playback of audio by creating an expansive sound stage, putting you, the listener, in the center of the performance. iWOW Premium also restores audio cues that are buried in the original source material so your music and videos files sound more natural and more detailed.

Pretty much sounds like the junk I was just condemning, no?  Well, after using iWow for a few hours on two machines (one desktop with external speakers and one laptop with built-in speakers) I can sum my experience up in five words:

It is the real deal.

You probably saw that coming, based on the title of this blog, but I was blown away at how much better the music from iTunes sounded after enabling iWow.  As I stated earlier, I’m a bit of an audiophile so I own a pretty nice pair†† of reference monitors and headphones for both casually listening to music and mixing audio for video post-production.  9 times out of 10 I keep the equalizer off because I think,with a decent set of speakers, the music will sound fine regardless.  Keeping all that in mind, I can say that iWow is not an equalizer per se.

Without delving too deeply into some of the principals behind psychoacoustics, let me just explain that it’s the process of altering our perception of sound, and not the sound itself.  It’s how Bose is able to sell a 2.1 surround sound system as 5.1 surround sound system replacement. This plus a very simple equalizer are the principals upon which iWow is based.

The music you’re listening to passes through iWow’s sound processor and enhances several different aspects of the music. Their advanced settings window looks like this:

It’s difficult to determine, by ear, what these settings do individually (aside from TruBass and Center level) but combining them all together produces some most excellent results.  The good news is that you don’t need to know what any of these settings do. You simply select the output device (speakers, headphones, or laptop speakers) and iWow does the rest.  One of the biggest improvements I heard were from the built-in speakers on a Macbook.  The difference in volume I was able to get once iWow was enabled was drastic and the speakers didn’t sound like they were struggling to produce the enhanced sound, either.

The effects of iWow also seemed quite pronounced on all music files, regardless of compression or file type.  I used the final two songs off Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon — Brain Damage and Eclipse — as my test subjects.  The songs were transcoded in both MP3 and AAC formats at the following bitrates: 128, 256, and 320.  I also took a lossless sample in WAV format just for the hell of it. The better the quality of the music going in, however, yielded better results with iWow enabled.  You can only do so much with the flimsy, tinny sound of an MP3 encoded at 128kbps.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the iWow experience and would recommend it to others, especially laptop users who don’t routinely have a pair of speakers or headphones with them.  The richness of the sound after processing is a delight to listen to and adds a new depth to songs you thought you knew backwards and forwards.