ipod and dac?

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!

It does appear that the iriver models have digital in and out, which should make them work with a dac. I would suppose that would ameliorate the compression problem to a degree. does anyone have experience with the iriver models?

I do understand that an ipod and the like is not for real high fidelity, but it would allow me to duplicate my home music collection for the office, and the system is good enough that the compression will matter somewhat. thx

I'm so glad this thread was started.
RSBECK wrote: "The Holy grail will be when you can get a digital out from your i-pod and/or your computer. Are you listening, Apple?"

I'm very interested in using my laptop PC and its 60GB hard drive as a storage device (not getting rid of cds yet, though). There are various PCMIA soundcards that offer digital outs, so although the laptop is bigger than the ipod, it's still portable. Back to the original question, assuming I rip cds using EAC or something similar with no compression, will I do well getting a good dac to link between my laptop and audio rig? I guess what I'm asking is whether digital audio coming off the hard drive, assuming no compression, will equal the output of a quality cd player or transport?

D