Experience with portable "mp3" devices

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!

Or if you want to get more serious click the link below-

HeadRoom

Steve

I think that compression is a huge issue. They all sounded like crap to me until I decided to waste space and go lossless. $50 headphones make a huge difference too. I just got a Sansa Clip for my daughter and it sounds great with lossless.

Srwooten - thanks great link.

Loomis- The Cowon players have a remarkable SNR andplay wav files, so may be the ticket, nice one. Also, have to say, loving the price tag on your headphone suggestions.

Some great headphones to be had, at a reasonable price.
Reminds me of my all time fav pair, what i thought were just cheapo $50 sonys, but brought every piece of music I owned to life. They turned out to be like the candy you had as a kid, but now being an adult all the new stuff just doesn't taste the same.

In terms of mp3 brands - I would check out iRiver. I think their players sound better than the usual crap. I have recently migrated to a Slacker G2 which sounds as bad as the rest of them. However, I agree that the quality of the headphones you use makes a HUGE difference. I recently purchased a pair of Audio Technica ATH-ESW9a headphones. Their musicality makes me almost forget that I am missing a huge chunk of what I would normally be able to hear through my regular system.