The Audio Xciter music player’s press release is full of the usual superlatives, and I quickly glossed over them in my usual cynical manner looking for something to make fun of (which I found – more on that in a bit). But one listen of the audio-processing iOS app is enough to make you sit up and, uh, listen.
It really is amazing.
Tune, Harmonics, AE Drive, BB Mix: These are all parameters that can be adjusted by people who know what they’re doing. For the rest of us, you can pick low, medium or high settings, and switch the Xciter on and off for comparison.
The DSP (digital signal processor) algorithms take your crappy MP3s and manages to open them back up. Bass becomes bigger and deeper, but not boomier. Small details become clear, voices more human and the whole sound stage opens up.
If you are old enough to have used a record player (or early CD player) with a great amp and big speakers, back before CDs and MP3s started shipping with horribly compressed audio, you will be familiar with the open sound, where loud things are loud and quiet things quiet.
Audio Xciter is based on studio processing tech from Aphex. Which brings us to the teasing. Here’s a snippet from the press release:
Legendary musicians such as Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, and Led Zeppelin have relied on the Aphex technology behind Audio Xciter for years and pay $30 per minute to use it for audio mastering.
$30 per minute?! That sounds like an old-school rip-off B2B model right there. And the actual iPhone app tries hard to ape this confusion: The free version limits you to 15 minutes of listening per day (a trial version, if you will), the Basic ($5) version removes this limit and the full version ($10) allows extra tweaking.
I’m impressed. I have tried other sound “improving” apps and found them pointless or worse. But Xciter really is pretty astonishing. If you do nothing else, download the trial and take it for a spin. And make sure you listen to an audiobook while you do it. The difference is like listening underwater, and then coming up into the air.
Source: Aphex
Thanks: Liz!
Charlie Sorrel writes reviews and how-tos. Follow Charlie on Twitter at @mistercharlie, and at micro.blog on @mistercharlie
6 responses to “Audio Xciter App Does Incredible Things To Your Music”
How does this compare to the Bongiovi Acoustics app? I actually liked that one, and it just works automagically, with no tweaking on my part.
Spend 15 minutes with it today and was blown away. I had to keep listening to the original in the iPod app to make sure they weren’t dampening down the original to enhance the effect, but it does seem to do the job for real. That’s me £3 down for the day, but totally worth it so far.
A little worried about some sound breakups since buying it, wonder if it’s because my collection is in Apple’s cloud and there is a buffer issue.
Hmm, doesn’t seem to support iTunes Match. When trying to play a file from the cloud it says “This DRM-encoded song cannot be played”. I hope they fix that.
I tried the free version and yes, it does sound better with it on. But the iphone grinds to a halt if you try to run another app, far worse then running the stock music player.
Summary: Not earth shattering but useful.
I’m afraid I don’t share the same opinion as Charlie, and whilst I would strongly recommend checking this out, (I bought it :-), I am not comfortable with all the superlatives being used.
It can be very useful for some music but not everything.
Two days listening into using the Xciter, I hope my following bullet points (using Ultimate Ears headphones – or iPhone speaker) – may be useful to others.
* If I had to describe what it does to the sound I would say it’s like having the treble/bass turned up for you automatically on certain parts of the music. It reminds me of playing a cassette tape back (remember them :-) but without pressing the Dolby button. You hear more detail.
* GREAT FOR PARTIES. It’s the sort of punchy power sound you want on those occasions.
* It’s similar to the iTunes player on the iPhone, so there is no real learning curve.
* On most of my music I preferred listening without the Xciter.
* If using the Xciter, I preferred the Low setting, or Custom, but generally I found the sound harder/shriller and for most of my playback.
* On my iPhone3GS it seems to use all the CPU power which causes a momentary minor glitch in playback, like jumping a groove.
* I would have liked a link from the app to the manual/help file
*Finally, I would summarise it ….
…..* It reminded me strongly of buying a Yamawhatsit amp many years ago, which had Class A and Class B stages, variable filters etc.. and the works… but I got rid of it because despite it being great for parties, I never relaxed into the music. It was just very tiring to listen to for protracted periods.
….* I mix a regular live non studio recording session each week, and over time I have got used to trying to get a ‘natural-real’ sound that is a good representation. (The remix comes later) When some trainees have a go, they usually confuse a clear sound with adding treble boost. It sounds like it’s better but it’s not.
* VERY IMPORTANT. Don’t go by what I say…. Check out yourself!
Here is how it sounds to me…
Favourite uses:
—————-
All I know – Art Garfunkel
What a fool believes – Dooble Brothers.
We have all the time in the world – Louis Armstrong
Move on Up – Cutis Mayfield (The remastered version only)
Hear the detail (and master tape hiss in::
———————————-
Killing me softly – Roberta Flack
Too harsh for me:
——————
Bright side of the road – Van Morrison
Hope that may be helpful! :-)
Anne
I would totally agree with the guest poster above, although my music tastes differ greatly e.g. heavy metal, hip-hop.
After 2 days of using AE, I quickly found any of the 3 presets to be too harsh and grating in the high end. This can be diffused somewhat by lowering the AE mix slider, but this essentially nullifies most of the “magic” this app is supposed to have compared to switching processing off.
A bit of playing with the custom settings has found some happy medium, but I REALLY wish there were multiple custom slots, as I really need to compare (at least) 2 custom profiles side by side to perfect my sound.
Another bad thing about AE is that it randomly decides it’s going to restart a song from the beginning when I pause/play, lock/unlock, switch apps, etc (not sure yet which exact things trigger this). It will also glitch or drop out briefly when task switching, no doubt as the processing stream is being interrupted. Maybe understandable, but unless this is fixed, it will never be a seamless user experience like the default iOS player.
In it’s favour, it has less processing lag than Bongiovi or MyTunes.
Another plus to AE over Bongiovi or MyTunes, is its interface is most similar to the default iOS player – the other two apps are tricky to navigate, and MyTunes doesn’t even show cover art in the album list!!! Add the ability to view lyrics in AE and the interface would be complete.
As a side note, I agree with Amarokada that AE, to its credit, does not degrade the original signal to compare better with AE processing. However, Bongiovi DEFINITELY DOES do this, as a quick listening comparison will show you. Although I quite like the sound I got from the free version of Bongiovi, the fact they make this deception lowers my regard for their product massively.
Overall impression of AE:
I’d like a few more days to try AE’s custom settings (made difficult by only 1 custom slot), but if the song restarting, glitching continues to be a problem, it will essentially spell the end of this app for me. I also wonder how much battery it uses; their FAQ says negligible, but Bongiovi state their app uses as much processing power as a high-end 3D game! I imagine AE would be similar…