Quote:
I would like to get some input from fellow audiophiles on the iPod for an article that I am writing for my Website (www.hifirotation.com). I have seen two camps for the iPod: those that think any form of compressed music is garbage and others that think by using additional ad ons can make iPod music acceptable. I would like to know what you think?

See the articles I have written at www.stereophile.com/computeraudio/1008servers/index2.html and www.stereophile.com/features/308mp3cd .

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

I'm using the Wadia 170i dock with my iPod Classic 160G transport to bypass the iPod's internal DAC and run the digital signal into my Playback Designs MPS-5 CD/SACD player. The results are very good. It sounds superior to playing the source CD on either my Oppo or Pioneer Elite universal players. (The PD upsamples to DSD and applies it's own alogarythm, which improves RBCDs to almost SACD levels).

You really do notice any differences in file quality. I download in Lossless with error correction on each download, but apparently some of my older files weren't error corrected and sound noticeably inferior to correctly transferred files.

Dave

I think as long as the data from iPod gets into a quality DAC with jitter issue reasonably resolved, it'll be fine. There are some DACs (i.e. Bryston BDA-1) which claim that they re-clock the data at the DAC level to render the jitter issue moot... Dave, does Playback Design player reclock the incoming data at the DAC level or does it just depend on the Wadia dock?

I'm told by PD that the digital inputs are reclocked, but I have no way to verify that.

I wish JA would test one so that I know a few more things for certain. They claim zero jitter with the internal transport, but no independent person has verified any of their claims. Unfortunately they're very unlikely to ever have the minimum number of dealers that JA requires for a review.

It sounds good, so that makes me happy enough.

Dave