ipod as source?

took your advice and started using a dock and the sound improvement was great. not as good as thru my vdac and cd player but still much improved

I have an iPod cable from Ram Electronics similar to this, but without the USB drop. Wish I'd gotten it that way as it enables you to keep the iPod connected to AC power. Even so, this type of cable (and the RAM is a well-made cable) extracts the analog audio from the dock pinouts, thereby bypassing the iPod's opamp behind the headphone jack.

However, the best analog sound I've extracted from my iPod Touch is by using a Zu Pivot mini-to-RCA cable. The Zu cable is so much better that it trumps bypassing the opamp with a mid-level cable.

Pleased to agree with Johnnyb53. I use the Zu Pivot cable when I need to take my iPod as source for some type of auditioning or demonstration, sometimes paired with a Winsome Labs Mouse that I take along too, and it never fails to astonish music listeners. For this reason, that the headphone output stage is inferior is probably a monster myth too.

Grege - Are you saying that the reason my Onkyo iPod dock sounds like junk compared to my CD and SACD players is because I'm comparing lossless to lossy and not because of the iPod DAC? If so, I would expect to notice a significant improvement when I put my iPod on the dock now that I have Apple Lossless files that I can load it with. Is there something about the Onkyo dock that would prevent this from being the equivalent of using the basic cables to connect?

MSB makes an iPod that is modified so the DAC is bypassed. It's a very nice unit. Somewhat expensive though.