Can Anyone Please Walk Me Through This?

Cwlondon, I don't know how well LAME or EAC work, I have not used either. But I believe your MP3 files were encoded at a lower bit rate. I have experienced the same edgy, hard, and fatiguing sound quality you described when I ripped CDs at below 192kbs. But at 320kbs VBR, the sound quality is really excellent. Give it a try. It might surprise you.

Sidssp

I am sure the 320 kbs is much better and probably pretty good.

I do find it interesting, however, in a forum where we split hairs between CD transports and cables, that the WAV (bit for bit) files would be indistinguishable from the compressed files on Sennheiser 650's which I dont own but understand are very revealing, more or less reference quality headphones.

Perhaps this is because the playback is ultimately still limited by the iPods internal amp and D/A converter?

Sorry to continue to be so stubborn on this subject, but it still seems to me that a lossless WAV file would be the best digital archive.

Then, if I could ever figure out how to get those bits from the computer, or the iPod, into a serious D/A, an external headphone amp, and my Etymotics ER-4's with custom silicon earpieces.......

I second the VBR mp3 file suggestion using EAC. In addition, as I've mentioned elsewhere, with the ipod, storage isn't your main concern, battery life is. The ipod has only a 16 or 32mb buffer (I think it's 16 though). With uncompressed wav files this keeps the hd spinning nearly constantly and battery life will plummet from an already sub-par battery life of 7-8 hours. Using my ipod, with several amps and with several headphones (the best being shure e5's) I was unable to distinguish between wavs and vbr mp3s.

The VBR mp3's are so good, that I picked up an m audio firewire audiophile external soundcard and run a digital out with coax Signal Cable from my computer into my stereo. The sound is excellent. The only reason I can occasionally tell a difference is because the mp3s sound a bit quiter for a given volume setting--I have no idea why this is though.

Avoid the standard 128kbps mp3s like the plague (I'm sure you know this already).

Perhaps I'm dense, but I'm not twigging here on the issue... Why not just rip to WAV files using EAC and transfer those to the iPod if you are that worried about audio quality, or is the issue there that WAV files don't have ID tags and therefore you can't use the artist/album, etc. indexes? Could you rip to WAVs and just build custom playlists using MusicMatch or whatever jukebox software comes on your WinBox? The Win iPod should be .m3u compatible, so playlists should transfer.

BTW, 320kbps VBR makes no sense to me. VBR = *V*ariable *B*it *R*ate. Because 320kbps is a bit rate, 320 kbps CBR (C=Constant) makes sense, but not VBR. I use the alt preset settings--"-alt preset extreme" to be specific. It is a VBR scheme. You should realize that LAME, and mp3 compression generally, has a huge number of variables that you can play with besides simply bit rate. The "alt presets" are the coding communities' best effort to maximize audio quality for a given average compression ratio.

My recollection is that with alt preset extreme, I get compression on the same order as higher quality 128 kbps CBRs--about 10:1, about a MB/min. If you are compressing at 320kpbs, you ought to get 4:1 or so. At that point, I think I might just go with the WAVs. Or, try the "-alt preset insane" setting.

Whether or not you can hear a difference between various data compression formats is highly dependent upon the type of music being auditioned. My experience is that current production pop/rock recordings, i.e. heavy dynamically compressed recordings, are virtually indistinguishable from their originals when compressed to MP3 type formats. I say virtually because on my main system I still can detect a loss of imagining/soundstaging information. It's a subtle loss of info, but it is readily audible. In the car it's not a factor.