We just got the Intunition Clari-fi in the office today. It was handed off to me as something that might potentially be "Gearloggy." After getting the quick rundown on what the device does--or purports to do--I was forced to answer with a decided, "Fair enough."
The Clari-fi is a small white box and the end of a 1/8th-inch jack that sits between your headphones and MP3 player like an extension cord. The device is designed to make your music sound better. Since most loss in MP3 sound quality is a result of overly compressed files, logic might suggest that the device would attempt to decompress things a touch. But the Clar-fi actually attempts to do the opposite, by filtering out "the edginess or sharpness inherent in most MP3 recording playback."
According to Intunition, "The human ear has a built-in method of dealing with these spikes and peaks--it reduces the over-all volume. The person may not hear, or be aware of these damaging artifacts, so the volume of the sound just seems to be too low." All of which seems to suggest that even if Clari-fi does in fact work as advertised, you won't be able to hear its effects.
I took the Clari-fi for a quick spin on my iPod, putting it through the paces with Man Man, Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, and Hank Williams, for variety's sake, and found little difference, save for a noticeable decrease in volume when the Clari-fi was plugged in. For the record, I'm not the staff's resident fidelity expert, so any subtle fluctuation in quality may have been lost on me.
If you'd like to give it a shot, you can pick the Clar-fi up through Intunition's site. Worst-case scenario, you get a really expensive headphone extension cord out of the deal. Best case, you go deaf a little less rapidly.
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April 30, 2008 1:59 PM
Creative, inventor of the iPod interface, and who's ZEN players are better than the iPod, last year introduced XI-FI, which can make your music sound better when you connect your iPod to it.
April 30, 2008 5:57 PM
Whether the Zen is better than the iPod is debatable, but beyond that, devices like this just don't make sense. A plug-in guy like this doesn't have any way to determine what in the music is noise and what isn't, and even if it could, you can't make music sound richer and fuller by REMOVING INFORMATION FROM IT.
That's like saying you can take a wallet-sized photo and make it clearer by trimming the sides a bit more. I think sci-fi has us fooled into thinking you plug something in, say "enhance," and suddenly data that's been removed from a file can be added back.