ipod and dac?

The Ipod uses a very small HD, so the price comparison to the Maxtor (a larger format drive) is not valid in this case. There's only one manufacturer that makes the small drives, last I checked.

the case and software certainly is worth $400+ I think, in this land of multi-thousand dollar power cords and speaker cables - in fact taking that into account it seems a total bargain. No one does user interfaces as well as Apple. The case and final product are a piece of industrial art, like most of the stuff they have made.

Batteries are user replacable, but it voids any warranty - there's a place online that sells them. It's a risky job to replace them though. I believe Apple has made improvements to the battery situation since the 1st gen ipods came out. It would be nice if they were designed to be user-replacable, though.

Sure, HD's fail - but so do CD players, etc. Assuming you had the original CD's that were copied to the drive, you are not losing anything (except time) if the drive dies.

I dont' have an Ipod yet either, but I think it's just a matter of time. A digital output from the unit would be a great thing to have too, btw.

-Ed

just another way to look at this, a $300 15GB ipod will give you access to 300 cd's, thats easily a $4500 investment. So for anyone who likes to listen to their music when they are away from home, traveling, commuting, at the gym, beach, etc. it is easily worth another $1 per cd to have that music available to you anywhere in the palm of your hand.

I have a 2 year old original 5GB version, no hard drive or battery problems. I also use it at least 5x times more than my home stereo as I travel a lot for work and use it every day at the gym.

I use an iPod with my collection and have been very happy with its performance. For critical listening sessions, I go vinyl only, so I primarily use the iPod when I have get-togethers or want background ambience.

Emster, I too have wondered about the possibility of using an outboard DAC with the iPod. Would love to know if anyone has and what results they got. This topic needs to get away from "is the iPod worth $400" and "hard drives fail". Like any device, it can fail. However, I have two friends that have generation one iPods and they are going strong.

That´s also my case, Troutki, I have a 24 months old 10 Gb Fist Gen. iPod and it works absolutely fine (Daily using)
And I subscribe your opinion about the topic.

The iPod is an excellent means of accessing music when on the go. Unfortunately, it's not really an audiophile product because it doesn't offer a digital output and the built in D/A is adequate, but no better. Despite that it's still an excellent product well worth the $300-500 dollars they sell for. I use a 30Gb model and after experimenting with uncompressed AIFF files I eventually settled upon AAC 192kbps mono files as my preferred file format. It works wonderfully in the car with no sense of compromise in such an audio-adverse environment.

I believe some of the iRiver products have digital I/O.