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