I know we have a few audiophiles around here and you all HAVE to know more than me about MP3 players.

Do any of the current generation of MP3 players deliver source quality adequate for relatively nice car and home system?

My other audio source units are a bit dated so I've only used the analog outputs on an iPod. I wasn't too thrilled with the results. I haven't had a chance to use the digital output of an iPod and let my home/car systems do the D/A conversion. Anyone here been there and done that?

Thanks in advance.

You'll have to define "nice" - my ears lost alot to a couple decades of Grateful Dead concerts standing way too close to the tower speakers. RIP Jerry...

I use a Zune in my Toyota Prius all the time, wired into the Auxiliary sound outlet, and it sounds nice to me. And I can also pump it through the home audio system, but usually don't, as wife and kids tend to cringe at a steady diet of Hank Williams, George Strait, Maria Callas, Cowboy Junkies, the Iguanas, and Eddy Yankovic, on constant shuffle. My daughter carries an iPod that she likes but has been unsuccessful with sound quality in her car - the Apple iPod FM transmitter that she got last Christmas has been buggy and full of static, and the Geniuses(TM) at the Apple Store insist it is all in her head, no one else in the known universe has ever had the problem. Great support strategy there, but I digress (still feeling the pain of buying her first laptop with the Apple tax and attitude included...)

My Solar powered Hi-Fi sounds pretty good, I have some details here;

http://forums.equipped.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=175102

Although I have stuck with my ancient Tannoy M3s rather than upgrade to the KEFs.

I cannot fault the Cambridge Audio upsampling DAC, although there has been a recall on the 12V PSU supplied (they are sending a replacement). Not really a problem since I use a Solar Panel/regulator/Battery setup.

The little Trends Class-T TA-10.1 amplifier is certainly audiophile grade listening. The TA-10.1 can also be used as a Bi-wire setup (needs another TA-10.1 and a pre-amp though) as shown in the review below.

http://www.sixmoons.com/audioreviews/trends/ta10.html

I just use the digital output from an Archos 605 using SDHC cards but can also stream internet radio over a wifi connection. The DAC also has 2 other digital outputs as well, I run a digital optical output from a LG M227WD digital Computer monitor/TV so can also listen to high quality digital DVB-T TV and digital radio broadcasts as well. The last digital output is connected to the PC via USB.

Overall the setup is reasonably cheap and cheerful for my little office setup but the sound is pretty darn good even for the audiophile critics because there is no 50 or 60Hz hum interference, no mechanical rotating parts and the PSRR is almost unmeasurable.

I'm currently listening to some Caravan CDs such as 'Waterloo Lilly', 'For Girls that Grow Plump in the Night', 'In the Land of Grey and Pink' and 'If I could do it all over again, I'd do it all over you' that I received for Christmas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtOZEAfikSw

Most any MP3 player will do quite well in delivering high-quality sound. What will almost always be the deciding factor is the bitrate that was used to sample the sound when it was converted into an MP3. For MP3, the higher the bitrate the closer it is to the original quality. The encoder used also has a big impact on quality. You may have to experiment a bit to figure out what works for you.

Compression is the reason I've not made the jump to MP3 players before. I would absolutely be sticking with .wav or a lossless format. I really don't think I want to go any smaller than 64 Gb for that reason as well. I could go 32 Gb if I had too and I could just rotate music according to my mood. Rotating music was one thing I was hoping to get away from though.

I think I'm just going to have to buy the best stuff I can find and try it out. I'll most likely pick up a iPod Classic (160 Gb) and then update my car's head unit to something with full iPod controls and the D/A conversion on the head unit. Toys sure get outdated quick these days.

Most any modern cell phone can play mp3's as well as several other compressed and non compressed formats as well so you may not even need to buy a dedicated player.
Are you playing mp3's through the ipod or songs you have bought though itunes which are actually mp4. Despite Apples great fanism mp4 and ipod sound quality is pretty bad when played through anything but small headphones.
I'm going to order an aux in adapter for the radio in my truck because my phone can play mp3's at better quality than the cassette adapter I'm using at the moment.

Make sure the ipod will still play and CHARGE from the digital connection. many ipods and all iphone 3g and 3gs will not charge from many car connections. Some BS about over charging and/or draining car batteries with the original iphone.

I never had that problem, but Apple fixed it for me anyway.....

Really P!$$&) me off too.

I don´t have an iPod but about two years ago I visited local hi-fi exposition/show. In one room, where I was listening Dynaudio speakers, I noticed that there was a hi-fi device with iPod plugged into it from the top. It looked like this: http://www.stereophile.com/digitalprocessors/1008wad/index.html - maybe it was this very machine. So the theory is that if hi-fi manufacturers consider iPod as a source of signal its output quality shouldn´t be bad at all. I didn´t listen to it though. I was interested mainly in the Dynaudios in the room and was listening to music I had brought via some classic CD player.
However the reviewer in the article I linked above is saying goods things about iPod sound quality.

Its not that the ipod is bad, its more the itunes/mp4 format. If you use something else to copy another format such as mp3 its better. But then you may as well buy a different brand since itunes integration is the main feature of ipods.

Personally I have stayed away from the whole iTunes store/iPod combo basically because of the crippling DRM issue Apple have implemented in their whole setup. I am amazed that folks have fallen for the Apple business model of selling music in this way by purchasing lossy MP4 music. I will always buy the CD, the SACD or the DVD-A, then re-encode to Linear PCM (WAV) or Apple Lossless (using iTunes) or even OGG (using Winamp) etc.

As for the iPod players, they are sure neat little players but you are again limited to which container formats you can play back in MP4 when purchasing music via the iTunes Store.

The earlier hard drive iPod Classic etc in not really preferred over the Solid State memory card such as SDHC. i.e. a removable 16GB card can be had for $30 each - enough to store around 25 albums in Red Book CD quality PCM simply because of their reliability and other issues such as the induced errors in the digital PCM stream such as jitter caused by pulling data of a noisy mechanical rotating hard drive. Buffering memory on the hard drive may not be enough when pulling of 150 MB WAV audio files. I would go with a PMP which is all solid state memory without the restrictions of the Apple iPod DRM issue, which can also take secondary external flash memory such as SDHC. Having wireless network capability is useful at home as well, as media files (audio and video) can be played from NAS devices and PCs via Windows Media player shared folders over the wireless network.

Can the iPod touch play downloaded Youtube videos for example. In many cases this method of getting the odd music track is even preferable to the iTunes store.

There is a lot of freely available music available in the higher quality OGG format (prefferable over MP3) such as

http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/grace.valhalla

Which cannot be played on the iPod for example

I too don´t like the idea of purchasing DRM lossy music. I listen to the kind of music which is very non-mainstream so I kind of fear that some albums on CDs won´t be available in stores forever. I plan to eventually buy all my favorite albums to have them in my collection in CD quality before they disappear from the shelves and because it´s investment for the future when and if I get some decent hi-fi system. (Actually I was close to putting together one entry-level system. I bought used Harman Kardon amplifier which was connected to PC. I listened to it via low end headphones. Still it sounded decent. I wanted to get mission m71 loudspeakers but it didn´t happen in the end and I had to sell the amplifier because I needed money for something else which couldn´t have waited. I regret it a little bit .)

I have ZERO interest in using Amazon MP3, the iTunes store or Zune Marketplace. For that reason I'm not too worried about any Apple DRM issues. I intent to use the device solely as a means to carry around a significant chunk of music without moving CDs from the car to the house and back constantly. I only intent to copy music from CDs that I own to the device in a lossless format.

Raptor,
Thank you very much for the link to the story. Kind of confirms a lot of what I was hearing about bypassing the iPod's junky D/A converters.

A.F.L.M.,
I was wondering about the possibility of mechanical noise off the HDD based units myself. I'll have to dig a little deaper into my high capacity solid state options like SDHC vs. the solid state players like the 64 Gb Touch.

If your thinking seriously about the iPod Touch then the Onkyo NDS1 digital docking station may be worth a look as it has a digital audio output for connection to a dedicated DAC/Amplifier.

http://www.eu.onkyo.com/products/ND-S1.html

It should make for a reasonably good source at a reasonable price.

Typically the cost for such an audio source would be

iPod Touch 64GB - $399
Onkyo NDS1 docking station - $210 (based on UK prices)
Cambridge Audio Dacmagic - $429

Then of course you will need you amplifier or preamp/monoblock amplifiers and speakers with some decent interconnects and speaker cable.

I also use a Archos TV 250Gb (has a HDD and was found on sale for around $70) along with an original Cambridge Audio DacMagic 2 and very cheap but surprising good Accoustic Solutions SP100 amplifier (again on sale for $75), which I mainly use with the HDTV in another room. The HDD in the Archos TV device can be heard at very low audio levels in the same way that I could hear the 50Hz hum from the original 3 frame powerline transformers than was in the 12 year old DacMagic 2 (which were swapped out for toroidal transformers). But the HDD sound volumes in the Archos TV are about what you may get spinning a CD in a mid level CD player. The HDDs in the Apple iPods will probably not be noticable to most folks though. This is why I have eliminated any mechanical rotating parts and power line 50Hz hum from my current setup and why I am now using a DC Solar/SLA Battery supply. The difference is actually very noticeable (well for me that is) i.e. greater than the difference between playing Red Book PCM CD and high bit rate lossy MP3 tracks IMHO.

One of the best hi-fi system I have ever heard was a Sony SACD reference system about 10 years ago. But the cost of the system was around $50,000 even then.

http://www.avland.co.uk/sony/sacd/sacdproductsbig.jpg

The problem with these very high end systems is that they are so good that the limit of the hi-fi sound reproduction is actually now in the recording studio and the technology of the recording studios from the 1970s (I like my 70s music as most of the music today is really quite tedious to listen to) really wasn't as good as some folks would like to believe despite the re mastering that is now common place. Even modern CD recordings may have waveform clipping when being mastered leading to very high levels of distortion and generate inappropriate harmonics.

You might not now, but After ripping all my CD's I put them away and now I prefer to not buy CD's rather buy the electronic format, so you may want to think about the future. Put a new radio in m wife's car with a CD player but then saw it had a USB port on it so we just copied a bunch of music on a cheap flash drive and plugged it in and it plays. I bought myself a new phone and then went and bought its car dock and started using it that way and play music through it rather than CD's. Sooner or later your going to want to buy more music, I bet you could find a place that sells the files lossless.

Re Desperado,

I don't know who fed you that line but the issue with charging newer ipods from a car or older USB to iPod cable was that the original iPod was designed to charge via Firewire and used different pins on the dock connector for charging the battery. Today most iPods and iPhones are USB only devices. Some of the older charging cables were actually just re-routing the USB power to the "firewire" pins on the connector. It worked but could cause the iPod to over draw the source since USB doesn't provide as much power as firewire, no real hazard for the iPod but it could damage a cheap USB driver circuit. The more recent devices no longer use those pins so they are correctly reporting that they cannot charge when power is present on those pins instead of the expected "USB" pins.

Newer charges will say something like made for iPhone, I think.

- Eric

The sound quality of the audio format(s) used by the iPods are as good as any other digital music format. iPods support several standard audio formats for both lossless and lossy audio recording. How the music is encoded (bit rates, format choices) will impact both the file size and audio quality.

The music you purchase online is a compromise of reasonable quality for reasonable download times. This is similar to the compromise that digital music on a CD represents. Some people (me a long, long time ago) can actually hear the distortion introduced by the standard CD sampling rate - not as a tone but as a "harshness" in the sound. Today I can probably tell the difference between a CD and a downloaded MP3 on a good day, if I'm lucky.

As far as DRM goes - apple had/has about the least restrictive DRM setup out there. Buy the music, create a playlist, burn to CD, read back into the computer in the format of your choice. Not great but at least you can burn the CD.

I'll take my old turntable any day but it just won't fit in my pocket .

- Eric

I haven't really had time to read this thread in detail, but I thought I'd point out there are a couple issues other than compression.

- Quality of the DAC in the unit.

- Ability to use the line out instead of the amplification section in the player (which typically isn't very good on portable players).

So, even with a lossless format, sound from an iPod might not sound optimal when run through the headphone output into a good stereo system.

Likewise, it has a so-so DAC.

In the case of the iPods, you can get an adapter to provide a line out such as:

http://www.sendstation.com/us/products/pocketdock/lineout-miniusb.html

In addition, it is possible to bypass the internal DAC on the iPods all together with a device like:

http://www.wadia.com/products/transports/170i/design.php

That said, I'd suggest for a car, you don't really need an off-board DAC. My guess is line out is plenty good enough.

As for home stereo, harder to say. Some people will be pretty happy with line out, some won't be happy until you run lossless to an outbound DAC, re-clocker, etc.

To really dig into this, spend some time hanging out on head-fi.org forums.

-john


An iPod touch running an line-out adapter to an external amplifier:

JohnN,

Nice toys! I agree the DACs and drivers on most portable devices are pretty poor compared to dedicated equipment. Compromises are a significant part of engineering something that small and portable. I spend enough money on my other hobbies that I don't dare check out the forums you suggested.

- Eric