Why bother with trying to get digital output from an iPod -- just get an Apple TV, and feed the digital audio output into your stereo receiver.
You also can use either your large screen TV, or your iPhone, (if you install the Remote app), so you don't have to walk over and squint at your iPod every time you want to select music.
Plus, it's stationary -- you don't have to bother with plugging and unplugging your digital music player anymore. And then there's all the other benefits of an Apple TV: movies, photos, podcasts, youTube, etc.
Plus, you can store as much digital music as you want on your Mac, (maybe it works with Windows too, I don't pay any attention), and synch music to the Apple TV, 40 or 80 GB at a time.
An even better way is to use Sonos (driven by the new iPhone app) or a Mac Mini, which means you can use AIFF and Apple Lossless files without the risk of dropouts on Airport.
These are concepts best addressed in a later feature. This was a way for people who use the iPod as their go-to product for both portable and home use. Personally, I'd use different products for the two roles, but I know people who disagree strongly.
Better still, an EEEPC. I would expect prices for these to drop even further in the near future. They're low energy and run XP so you can get itunes on it. There are rumours that the Mac Mini is doomed which would be a shame as this has become quite a popular home server because of low noise, size etc. A Slimdevices Squeezebox can use your itunes folder and can also use an ipod Touch as an handset (if you don't want to use theirs) with a proper iphone/Touch app slated for delivery in the future by the open source community.
The problem with many of these solutions is that they offer services to people outside the US for much higher prices or in the case of Sirius and Pandora, they don't offer them at all and we're buying kit with only 60% functionality.
Apple TV still has a way to go. It doesn't do FLAC which is a serious limitation as this is becoming the dominant form for lossless music and overall, doesn't quite do enough for what we have to pay ($320 for the smallest capacity and $427 for the useable one!). I don't know anyone in the UK who has got one of these.
Alan's Sonos recommendation is a good one (better sorted though more expensive than the Squeezebox) but I resent seeing all of those logos for products that it supports that I'm not allowed to buy because of where I live.
Better still, use one of those little silver discs called a CD. Choose it from your collection (and it's fun to browse), switch on your CD and amps, put the disc in the player and press play. Is it really THAT hard. Not everyone feels the need to jump on the i-pod bandwagon for ALL music. Whatever you do with the files on an I-pod they are ALWAYS going to be compressed and however good the quality is supposed to be there's a part of me that will always be thinking I can do better than this. I-pod is not hifi - it's still an insult to people who take sound seriously. And why spend £1500 on a docking station? Buy some decent seperates and listen to a proper hifi.
Personally I can access my entire (substantial) CD collection quicker than it takes to switch on an I-pod. The i-pod is ruining the experience for music enthusiasts. It's dumbing it down to the lowest common denominator where the visual aspect of packaging is removed to be replaced by a characterless, digital file on a computer.
Don't assume because something is popular it's better. I-pods have brainwashed people into thinking this is the way music should be heard. How sad for the future generations that technology has made music a stagnant commodity as opposed to an artform.
And yes I DO have an I-pod. I use it as a portable device which is EXACTLY what it was designed for and NOT as a replacement for a 'proper' hifi.
.....or if you have a mac, you could get an Apple Airport Express (£65), link it to your hifi amp wherever it is in the house and control the whole thing on your itouch or iphone with the free application "Remote". With Remote, you get to see all your artwork. Although its locked to Apple HW (what's wrong with that?!) its easily as good as Sonos and hundred of pounds cheaper...enough to by that amp or speaker upgrade even. You do get the very occasional drop out, but its amazingly versatile, high quality and easy to use.
Actually, I don't think it's that bad these days - quite the reverse. I think an ipod at 128kbps in a stereo dock outperforms most people's vinyl listening experience 20-30 years ago.
I was reminded how bad things were when I saw this; Amstrad Product Archive. I actually used to sell hifi as a teenager in the 80's and sold a lot of the TS40 which sounded shocking. It was a fake stacking system so if they were sent for repair, you only had to remove the front panel and send it away because there was only about two inches deep of electronics mounted vertically on the back of the panel. The majority of the box - some 80% or more was fresh air. For most people, this was what they aspired to. The more popular model that followed it which had a sliding record drawer (technology!), had as little 2.5 W/channel RMS from a conventional solid state amp. With some speakers that I sold, they only had one driver each and the tweeters were just painted on underneath the grille cloth. In that context, we're enormously lucky now.
Although this was the end of a golden age in terms of vinyl production and format quality, it was only a few people who were able to hear it. Maybe we have a distorted view of the past because so much good high end hifi has survived and been repaired rather than thrown away.
I would argue that the average person with an ipod and a collection of MP3s has better audio these days than at any point in the past.
I agree that audiophiles are being starved by formats at the moment but high quality downloads are starting to be available and Blu-Ray is starting to take off. I was in some record shops today and noticed that there was actually a lot of Blu-Ray on display. Blu-Ray offers terrific audio opportunities.
I agree there is still a lot wrong with network audio though and that is what is keeping it as an enthusiasts hobby.
I remember the Amstrad and its sound yuk ? got to tell this one ? advertised in large Sunday paper, the first low cost stereo radio think it was the seventies, chap i know asked me to take a look at the one he had purchased, as it had ceased working ? on opening this cheap box i found one small transistor radio linked to one cheap speaker with two bog roll tubes placed both sides of the speaker ? never laughed so much in my life, but roll on a few years what have we got the Bose system tube technology ? yes sounds quite good but basically the same idea but with two speakers ?
As for portable headphone Amp, the Cmoy type is a very good alternative to the most expensive one on the market. The design is so simple you can build it yourself or buy it on Ebay for 30 Pounds. This will improve dramaticly the sound quality to your headphones, specialy if you are using Grado or Sennheiser PXC range.
We are talking about listening to your music on the move here and the I pod is a good way to do that. I do accept to loss quality for portability. For my part Ipod sound quality will never close to the experience of listening to your favorite CD or SACD on you High end Hi-Fi System in a relaxed atmosphere and comfy sofa.
I think James sum up pretty well the purpose of the I pod.
After all this is just marketing trying to make you believe than one piece of equipement can be the best at doing it all.
Carl, I think that was a Philips that had the cardboard rolls fitted. Yes, that was true; they did that.
People bought these things and generally listened to music on the Medium Wave too. Fivelive quality rather than MP3.
I also think people are listening to more music because of the ipod. What the modern equivalent be of a CD or vinyl record be now do you reckon? About £30-40ish versus the 80's pricefor a CD?
The other assumption that I'd challenge is that there is more music piracy today than in the past. I would really like to see some statistical evidence. The blank cassette industry was huge and almost none of those were bought for legitimate reasons. Now that music is cheaper I also think that pirated music is more likely to lead to the purchase of legitimate music where I don't think that would have happened in previous decades because of the cost.
Its not really a like for like comparison to make of "ipod on the move" with CD and hi end hifi. An ipod or itunes on a PC/Mac at its most basic is a digital storage vehicle, just as a CD is or a hard drive or a USB stick. There is no reason at all that a lossless recording on Mac/PC/Ipod cannot sound identical to the CD if its digitally connected to half decent hifi. Couple that with the versatility of quickly accessing all your stuff, playing random selections from thousands of tracks, selecting genres...and on and on...
Guaranteed...the CD will go the same way as vinyl. Though I expect vinyl's cute mechanical bits and bobs will help it outlast CD's.
I have had iPods for quite a while now, and they're great for traveling, in the car and the gym. But, one of the best arguments for an iPod type player is ease in accessing your music collection. And for some, the size of our collections overwhelm the limited organizing capabilities of iTunes or iPods.
Lots of us have been collecting CDs for twenty-five years now, (and LPs and Laser discs even longer.) I have shelves and plastic Rubbermaid bins loaded with the souvenirs of forty years of collecting music. How to lay your hands on one, or even remind yourself of what you have?
I have found a barcode scanner such as the IntelliScanner, hooked up to my laptop, to be a powerful way to keep track of all my music (and video.) Its Media Collector software searches online databases for cover artwork and artist details, much like the iTunes store, only much more comprehensively.
iPod's wrecking sound quality? Totally disagree. An iPod compared to a cassette-based portable is a remarkable step forward. As is the improvement over an early CD personal with no error correction.
Used properly (Apple Lossless or AIFF/WAV) and used through the Wadia and a DAC, it makes for a good portable music serer. It's not as good as a dedicated music server, but more because the interface is not as good, not the audio quality is bad.
Here's the thing. Put a CD player and a computer through a DAC that can support both and pick out two discs that have been ripped with error correction in place and stored losslessly or better. Listen to the first recording. Chances are, you will not be able to tell the difference; you may even find the sound through the computer to be better, if the disc is damaged in some respect. Or simply played more than a few times.
That's just the start. Now swap discs at the same time selecting the second album on the client software. By the time you've ejected the disc, loaded the second disc, waited for the TOC to be read, selected the right track, pressed play... the computer will be several seconds into the track. And that's with a CD waiting in the wings. When it comes to finding one in a library... you'll be minutes into the track on the PC.
There's nothing wrong with CD, there's nothing wrong with CD players. But the next steps in audio development will be treating the disc as a data carrier, nothing more.
My CD walkman actually does sound better than my ipod but a lot of people used minidisc because it didn't skip so much and went from cassette to minidisc to MP3.
It's a shame that didn't take over from the CD in it's final iteration as that had 1gb of storage and was physically more convenient. Unfortunately, the pre-recorded ones were only ever ATRAC - better than mp3, not as good as CD. The high end Sony minidisc players were beautifully designed and the manufacturing standards put their MP3 players to shame. These days Sony differentiate their MP3 players mostly on capacity.
I like physical formats because they seem to be less under the control of the record companies and you can sell them/give them away without being called a thief but once I've got them, it's straight on to the PC.
I have blind A/B'd with a CD player versus FLAC files on a computer ripped with multi pass software through the same DAC and I can't tell reliably the difference.
The other wonderful thing that computer music and mp3 does is automatic metadata from services like Gracenote and Freedb. Sound quality being equal (which it can be if you do it right), that's the real advance.
