Experience with portable "mp3" devices

having owned ipod, creative zen, rio and, currently, sandisk, i've come to the conclusion that (a) compressed mp3 files generally sound bad, (b) there's very little difference in sound quality (perhaps the ipod sounded the best by a small margin) between players--they all sound more-or-less the same, (c) i've read good things about the sound quality of cowon players, but can't personally opine thereon, and (d) headphones make a much more significant difference--my current faves are the open-air koss portapros and sennheiser px100.

In you situation the earphones are probably more important than the player. You will needs some good earphones/buds that will block out the ambient noise (muzak). As Loomis indicates, there's probably very little difference in mp3 sound quality among the various players.

Thanks, I'll have a look for some good in ear earphones.

Perhaps to deal with the mp3 compression business, I'll narrow things down to something that may handle wav and/or aiff's.

May have to hold off on the Creative Zen Stone (no aiff or wav playback)

I love my iPod. I use apples lossless encoding and iGrado headphones, by Grado. (I realize that " by Grado" may have been obvious.) They stay on your head when you're active, sound pretty good to. They do not block out the ambient noise, but you can hear people talk to you while you listen to music if you want, or turn them up a bit. They are only $50 too!