I just had a listen to one.

It's not as bad as it looked at first sight on the web journals.

It has much more scale and images better than the Bose and it has a DAC so you can connect optically to an Airport Express and get it to do the wireless thing that everyone was hoping for.

Hi Christopher, you might be interested to know we'll be doing a full review on the iPod Hifi shortly. Let's see if it can justify that £250 price tag eh!

I think it does.

The reaction of the other manufacturers was interesting. Monitor dropped the price of theirs immediately to take it out of competition.

It was interesting to listen to Steve Jobs presentation. He actually said that he was an 'Audiophile' and explained the product in audiophile terms, while explaining those terms for the audience.

Not sure that I like the look of this and price tag seems awfully high for an iPod accessory!!

That was broadly the response of the tech community who pretty much slated it because it's not the tech jewellry that they were expecting & that they had been given in previous announcements.

There was a lot of hype.

Sounds good though. I think you have to hear/see it to appreciate it.

I can see them dropping the price.

What I would have liked to have seen is a better coupling with the Ipod. Sticking out of the top is a little flimsy and you would probably worry about operating the click wheel in case you break the socket.

It needs a radio.

There are other problems such as the fact that part of the bass bandwidth is actually in mono because it uses a single bass driver. Some bass is only perceived in mono but I suspect it goes higher than that.

Hi Chris, yeah I noticed he used the word 'audiophile' in his speech. I found that a little surprising considering for a number of years he's been the one championing the iPod and the virtues of compressed digital music! The iPod is a lot of things, but an audiophile piece of kit it is not...

Compression is only temporary. As internet bandwidth and disc sizes increase, we'll start to look at higher bitrates and uncompressed files.

The only problem with the Ipod is 128kbps files from Itunes. If you try an uncompressed file on an Ipod, through a good preamp, it can sound quite good. Not ultra high end but still quite good.

We're long overdue for an upgrade to 256k in Itunes.

Yeah I agree you can get decent sounding music using Apple Lossless and I can't wait until iPods are big enough to store entire CD collections this way. I've got my collection at 320kbps MP3 and although songs sound fine through headphones they're a little tinny and lack warmth when put through my hi-fi. It's still a long way short of CD quality that's for sure.

HI all, going slightly off track here, but I've just procured a new Ipod and haven't found how to adjust the rate at which it saves music from my CD's.

Can anyone help? (Step by step idiots guide to I-tunes)

Have so far have been a little dissapointed with the quality of the sound, so I need to go lossless.

What I will say about the HiFi, is that I heard it in the Apple store and it didn't sound too bad.

But god is it ugly!

I think that will play a significant part in determining it's success.

In Itunes, from the menu, choose 'Edit' and then 'Preferences'.

Click on the 'Advanced' tab and then on the 'Importing' tab below.

You should be able to follow your nose from there.

It may be that it's highlighting the quality of the files. Try it in a different room. Some people have said that it likes higher volumes - letting it drive a bigger room might suit.

Thanks for the help!
Got a few new lossless recordings on there now. Can't say I've had chance to hear the difference as yet, looking forward to getting a few more and then investigating the prospect of getting some vinyl there too.
Someone suggested he had a £10 piece of software that would assist - don't know how reliable that will be though?

Patrick,

What lossless format are you going for?

I'm looking for a good FLAC encoder. Anyone have recommendations?

I've just used Apple lossless.

Can you use a different format for lossless within it?

Sorry I've only got it last week - not the best person to ask at this stage.

No. Just the two proprietary Apple file formats (Apple Lossless and AIFF) as well as AAC, WAV and MP3.

I'd like to be storing in uncompressed WAV but apparently you can't get an ID3 tag in to the file with any ease. FLAC is close sound quality wise but easier to use with a Squeezebox or Roku and is open source.

I'm encoding first and then building the network later.

Had my eye on this;

www.at-tunes.co.uk which is a re-engineered Squeezebox with a better clock DAC and power supply. Saw it at Heathrow. Sounded good.

To answer my own question; I ended up with Roxio Recordnow 8 Premier. £19.