ipod and dac?

I do not like the Apple supplied earphones. They sound okay...but do not rest comfortably in my ear. They might work for you though. For me, after a solid hour of listening, my ear hurts from the way they rest.

Gunbei, The supplied earbuds are good quality for their size and weight, but if you're used to Grados, you'll want to stick with them.

I use Sennheiser 580 precisions. Best thing to do is rip a CD using several different rates of compression and then one straight to the hard drive, uncompressed and see which is acceptable to you. For me, other than straight the the hard drive, uncompressed, the next best thing is to use AAC at 320 kbps. At that rate, using AAC, you can fit 400 CD's on a
40 Gig i-pod and it would be about the next best thing to uncompressed. It is an interesting experiment, though, to see what is
missing at different rates of compression.

Peter_S, do you mean that the Headphone sites have issues with the compressed audio quality, or the headphone amplification and output?

I would think that anybody who's a serious headphone listener would probably have something like a set of Grados and a Headroom headphone amp .. if a listener's used to that level of fidelity, I doubt that anything less is going to satisfy.

Awesome, thanks for the help!