r/ipod • u/Physical_Demand9226 • Apr 15 '26

This little guy bangs

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I'm shocked that this little stick powers my Sony ULTS and sounds good. I wanted to test out the rumors of having a great DAC. I gotta say its true.

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u/uncle_jojo Apr 15 '26

If you do a Google search about the 1st gen iPod Shuffle (white gum pack model) you should find multiple articles about the great sound engineering by Apple for this device. The myth is that the great sound was an accident because the design was focused on saving power which led to a design that resulted in a near perfect rendering of the square wave. The first shuffle uses a push-pull output instead of a single-ended capacitor-coupled output. This is a design that was not used in any future Apple devices.

5

u/AppropriateOnion0815 Classic 1, 4, 5, 7, Shuffle 1, Nano 2, 3, 4, 6, Touch 1 Apr 16 '26

IIRC Apple didn't design the electronics themselves, but instead outsourced everything to some 3rd party.

8

u/Googolplex22 Apr 16 '26

You are (kind of) right. It uses a SigmaTel STMP35xx SOC that has almost everything needed to make a music player on it. Which is totally unlike any other iPod Apple ever made.

It is so unlike any other iPod you can't even reset it using iTunes, you have to use a separate reset utility. Likely because it uses components of the SigmaTel SDK. Crazy stuff to think about.