eskay2 wrote:

Hello- I bought a Peachtree Decco65 amp recently and tried to play songs on my ipod through a dock (Pure). The volume is very low. The songs are stored in the AAC format.

CDs play very well. I was wondering if it was possible to play songs from ipod (or itunes account) at a high volume if not at the same quality.

Will using my laptop to play from iTunes be a better option?

Your Peachtree Audio Decco65 has a good internal DAC chipset (ESS 9023), and it accepts asynchronous USB digital input (up to and including 24/192), and both of those are very good features that you should be utilizing in your setup. 

I am not aware of any iPods able to output asynchronous USB digital audio stream. Put the iPod into your pocket, into your automobile's audio system, etc., but not into your home HiFi setup. Use a laptop configured for asynchronous USB digital audio output to your Decco65. 

I do not know (and frankly don't want to know) the details of your computer system, but do suggest that you not connect with the far more usual isochronous USB which tends to suffer excessive jitter (timing problems in the data stream) and was a big part of the reason early versions of USB audio had gained a bad reputation. Investigate the subject and make use of asynchronous USB. Also consider getting 2 large capacity external USB HDDs and a powered USB hub. Store your music library on one external USB HDD, and back it up on the other external USB HDD. Use lossless compression, not lossy. Large capacity HDD storage is inexpensive, so there is no need to pare information from your music data. Lossy compression permanently loses information from your data set, while proper lossless compression does not lose information from the data set. 

To get an asynchronous connection between your laptop and your Peachtree just connect them. Your Decco65 has an asynchronous USB DAC. It will automatically connect asynchronously.

I agree with JRT about HDD storage although I use FLAC for archiving music to HDD. You can store around 1300 CDs on a 500GB HDD using FLAC. AAC should be comparable. If you want MP3 files for portable use it's quite easy to convert AAC files to MP3 for a portable device. You can use freac (free audio converter) to convert file types. freac is free open source software.

Good advice, but (off the top of my head), isn't AAC lossy?  Perhaps you meant to say Apple Lossless Compression, which I think can be abbreviated to either ALC or ALAC.