ipod and dac?

About 2 years ago I decided to go “all digital” and rip my entire CD collection (500 CD’s and counting) to a dedicated file server. At the time I used and continue to use EAC to rip and LAME to compress to 224 VBR MP3’s.
I tossed and turned on whether to compress at all, choose a more obscure “loss less” compression such as Ogg or go with a propriety compression such as WMA or later AAC. MP3 won out for a numer of reasons, and I still stand by them:
1. Across platform and multi device compatibility.
2. Additional associated data possibilities, such as “comments” reviews and album art.
3. There is significant blind test data that shows that a compressed MP3 file at 224 VBR is indistinguishable from the original WAV file at 16 bit (native format for CD’s),
4. there is no way I am given Bill Gates and to a lesser degree Steve Jobs any say as to when, where and how I can play my music files, $!&% fair use and embrace open format.
5. MP3 may not be the best option out there but it is the MOST versatile.

To answer you question about an external DAC being required for hard drive audio, the answer is YES YES YES. There is a significant difference in sound quality with an external DAC, even a cheap one like and old soundstream / krell DAC1. With a good / great DAC I personally can not tell the difference between a CD transport and my hard drive, Add to this the incredible flexibility of spooling music files to any room in my houses over my home network, and immediate access to over 5000 files and I will never be going back.
As an aside anyone who claims that they can hear the difference between a AAC file encoded at 224 and an MP3 encoded at the same bit rate with a playback on an iPOD (ie relying on the ipod internal DAC and less than perfect headphones, compounded by ambient noise, is clearly delusional.
If I had access to a $100,000 rig in a perfect sound room, then perhaps I would have chosen differently, but given my current mid fi system, I think I have found a great balance. If you are interested in external DAR’s to spool mosaic files to a DAC then check out my thread in this forum on an Audiotron. With web enable wifi access you can also control the entire system from a wireless PDA.
And finally, I also own a new version 30gig Ipod and I love it, not in a carnel sort of way, butin a “wow” this is great piece of industrial design. I also think that it has by far the best user interface for an MP3 player out here. Try scrolling through 2000 titles with a forward and back button

The iRiver 120 model has digital output. There is an online review of it by a self-claimed audiophile, but it's a pretty worthless review as it does not use the digi-out to a dac....I've tried the Philips, iPod and Samsung players in my main system, didn't like any of them. Hoping the iRiver into a good dac will change things, but not too optomistic. I believe they have a new model coming out with over 50 gigs of HD and digital out, but very pricey....

To answer Dkidknow, a well setup hard drive playing uncompressed digital files will rival the sound quality of a high quality audiophile type CD transport. The key is having a high quality soundcard with low jitter digital outputs. I would recommend RME or Lynx. They are somewhat pricey for soundcards, but well worth it. Alternatively, Apogee (the pro digital company, not the old audiophile speaker manufacturer) and Wavelength both offer D/As with built in USB ports for connecting to a computer.

I was talking with a friend of mine at work regarding the issue of hard drive based music sources, and the question came up about fragmentation.

He's a graphic designer and I am a retoucher and all our work is created using Macs with tons of RAM and fast hard drives. Because of the nature of our work we wage a constant battle with disc fragmentation.

However, since the small hard drives used in devices like the iPod just store and play back music, am I correct to assume fragmentation shouldn't be a problem since files are not being written, read, deleted and re-written on a constant basis?

Or, do these devices have the ability to delete music files and have those same spaces/blocks re-written over which could prevent future files from being written contiguously and therefore leave open the possibility of fragmentation down the road?

Thanks.

Disc fragmentation isn't an issue with 2 channel audio playback. Any 7200 rpm HD with a 2Mb buffer can easily handle the task of 2 channel playback at any of the common consumer bit/sampling rates. In a recording studio where multitrack recording/playback is important, than disc upkeep becomes increasingly important. In that enviroment nearly everyone uses a dedicated HD for the music data and defragging is commonly performed. But then again, the playback of 2 audio tracks is trivial compared to the simultaneous playback of 16 tracks and the recording of 8 new tracks (with effects), a task that can be readily handled by hard disk systems.