Reviewer: Valkyrie
 Read all my reviews
Date: 12 Apr 2008, 02:34 GMT
Overall rating:  | GUI:   Features: Ease of use: Value:
Wow! This is a gem of a product one hears little about. Apollo 37zz is basically a high quality, audio file player which excels at decoding mp3 files to Wave.
Being something of an audiophile my music collection is mostly comprised of purchased cds extracted to Wave with EAC or CDex to my PC, but like most people I have a number of nefariously acquired, iffy, low quality mp3 files. That’s where the star that is Apollo 37zz shines, dig out your grotty little mp3 files and decode them to Wave with it before burning. Lossy encoding is lossy encoding, it can’t give you the original, pure recording back but it makes a really impressive difference to the sound quality of around 85% of these files.
As a musician *piano, violin, clarinet and saxophone* high audio quality is beyond price to me. I use Soundforge to edit/remaster low quality mp3 files before burning and Apollo 37zz is invaluable to me as it actually creates better quality Wave files from them for processing than Soundforge alone does. It undoubtedly decodes better *lower dither* than the MAD Mpeg decoder at it’s current stage of development, which is useful to know as the developer of Apollo ceased further development last year but it currently remains the best decoder.
My musical preferences are Heavy Dance, *e.g. Quivver, Plump DJs, Meat Katie* Rock *e.g. Nine Inch Nails, Sisters of Mercy, System of a Down* and Classical , so have thoroughly road tested Apollo 37zz with a wide, often complex, variety of music. I consider it to be an essential tool for those who audio quality really matters to, clean up those iffy mp3s and pump up the volume. =) |
