beware ipod

Ntscdan, your statement that "basically the ipod is not up for heavy duty wav playback" is not true. The type of hard drive used in the iPod is a common typed used in numerous laptop applications. Using WAV or AIFF format files will increase the number of times the hard drive in the iPod is accessed which in turn will decrease battery life, but it has a negligible effect on the hard drive's durability. I have a 30Gb iPod and have used it with both compressed and uncompressed files without any problems.

I agree entirely with Ben Campbells above statement that the iPod is not an audiophile oriented product.

The ipod, at less than $500, is certainly not an audiophile level player, but
for a casual player if offers incredible convenience and if you load it with uncompressed CD's, it can sound amazingly good considering its price and convenience. How much compression one uses is a factor of how much quality degradation one is willing to suffer during casual listening. When I play my ipod through my reference system using the headphone out, it sounds better than CD's played on my $400 Denon DVD player.

Ntscdan, before dismissing current portable music players altogether, seriously try out the method of encoding mp3's that I mentioned. I cannot tell the difference on my ipod with any headphone I have tried to date. I cannot tell the difference in the car (after being converted back to wav). And, in a double blind test on my home stereo (also playing wavs converted from alt-pres-stnd VBR mp3's) I barely got a statistically significant result. Oddly enough, the ones I could differentiate, was because of a volume disparity between mp3 and original pressed cd--don't know why.

Also, check this out for more interesting information.

http://www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusicclassical/mp3test.html

The mp3 encoding method I use is far superior to anything used in these tests.

I was the biggest basher of the mp3 format. I have heard (and still do) appallingly bad mp3's. The fact is, mp3 is lossy compression--but there are ways to encode for it that minimize (most times eliminate) audible differences. If you can get over the theoretical shortfalls and honestly evaluate it done correctly in practicle application, I think you'll find there's a lot of enjoyment to be had from them.

I like the sounds from my ipod.
However, i am reencoding my CDs as 256 AAC instead of 160mp3. Seems to have better dynamics.