A long story on how iTunes basically ate its competition back in the early days. Very entertaining. But I loved this part - -
Jeff Robbin then asked us a funny question that had obviously been percolating for a while: "Does Audion do any kind of special filtering?" You see, since the beginning of time, press reviews in magazines, websites, etc., had consistently said that Audion simply sounds "better" than SoundJam, without question. It wasn't until that declaration showed up in a very respectable, high-end British Hi-Fi magazine that people started to take it even more seriously. Audion was always noted for being "richer" or "sweeter", and we were tremendously proud of our incredible results in this regard.
The only problem was: we didn't do anything. We have no idea why people heard Audion as sounding better. We certainly didn't add any special filtering or "sound better" code. Our MP3 decoding process was about as ordinary as you could get. On paper, logically, there should have been absolutely no reason why Audion would sound any better or worse than SoundJam.
We put Jeff's mind at final, restful ease by blowing the big secret that, no, we also had no idea where that was coming from, but we definitely weren't about to argue. Who knows, maybe we did write some "sound better" code in a drunken haze — we're afraid to check!
