ipod and dac?

AAC, which sounds much better than MP3, at 320 kbps, will give you very good sound quality. At that rate, one CD takes up about 100 Megs. On a 40 Gig i-pod, you could fit 400 CD's.

Using AIFF, which rips the CD to your hard drive, uncompressed, one CD takes up about 500 Megs. On a 40 Gig i-pod, you can fit 80 CD's.

I am ripping my CD collection, which is over 1,000 CD's, to external
hard drives, ucompressed, using AIFF. With the cost of external hard drive space coming down, capacities going up, and the hardware getting
more and more compact, I figure it is better to rip my music uncompressed. I'd rather have 80 uncompressed CD's on my i-pod than
400 compressed. Using my external hard drives, I can circulate music
through the i-pod -- and carrying 80 CD's around is enough to keep me happy. Just a few years ago, the idea of having 80 uncompressed CD's in the palm of your hand was unthinkable.

You can also set up your car stereo to connect with an i-pod. In that sense, having 80 CD's beats the hell out of any 6 or 10 CD Changer.

Do you really need to have access to your entire music collection on a
typical commute?

Even on a long distance trip, 80 CD's can go a long way.

Plus, capacities will keep going up.

If you can't wait, buy two or three i-pods and carry them with you,
rotating them for variety.

Also, Alpine is coming out with a car stereo that will interface with an i-pod, take over it's functions, and keep it charged.

Three things have kept me from buying an iPod:

The first thing is price, iPods are VERY expensive re-packaged hard drives. A 40 gig hard drive (40.9 MAXTOR 7200 LIQUID 6E040L0) sells for $60. A 40 gig iPod sells for $499. Nice case, batteries, and some software wrapped around the hard drive, but certainly not $439 worth of value-add.

Secondly, it's been widely reported that the batteries in iPods fail (18 months seems to be the reported timeline when the batteries in an iPod give up the ghost). Since the iPod has a 12 month warranty you're out of luck. These batteries are not user replaceable and cost $100 for a fresh set.

Finally, hard drives fail. They are mechanical devices that generally speaking don't like being hauled around and subject to jostling etc.. Hard drives fail just sitting in a desktop PC. Anyone who chooses to use hard drives to store their music collection will be disappointed when the device quits. Hard drives fail, it's just a question of when.

You sure an iPod is worth the expense and hassle?

Jeffloistarca:

You make some very thoughtful points that are very much worth considering. I too, haven't gone the iPod route either for similar reasons.

The Ipod uses a very small HD, so the price comparison to the Maxtor (a larger format drive) is not valid in this case. There's only one manufacturer that makes the small drives, last I checked.

the case and software certainly is worth $400+ I think, in this land of multi-thousand dollar power cords and speaker cables - in fact taking that into account it seems a total bargain. No one does user interfaces as well as Apple. The case and final product are a piece of industrial art, like most of the stuff they have made.

Batteries are user replacable, but it voids any warranty - there's a place online that sells them. It's a risky job to replace them though. I believe Apple has made improvements to the battery situation since the 1st gen ipods came out. It would be nice if they were designed to be user-replacable, though.

Sure, HD's fail - but so do CD players, etc. Assuming you had the original CD's that were copied to the drive, you are not losing anything (except time) if the drive dies.

I dont' have an Ipod yet either, but I think it's just a matter of time. A digital output from the unit would be a great thing to have too, btw.

-Ed