ipod and dac?

The iPod is an excellent means of accessing music when on the go. Unfortunately, it's not really an audiophile product because it doesn't offer a digital output and the built in D/A is adequate, but no better. Despite that it's still an excellent product well worth the $300-500 dollars they sell for. I use a 30Gb model and after experimenting with uncompressed AIFF files I eventually settled upon AAC 192kbps mono files as my preferred file format. It works wonderfully in the car with no sense of compromise in such an audio-adverse environment.

I believe some of the iRiver products have digital I/O.

To answer Dkidknow, a well setup hard drive playing uncompressed digital files will rival the sound quality of a high quality audiophile type CD transport. The key is having a high quality soundcard with low jitter digital outputs. I would recommend RME or Lynx. They are somewhat pricey for soundcards, but well worth it. Alternatively, Apogee (the pro digital company, not the old audiophile speaker manufacturer) and Wavelength both offer D/As with built in USB ports for connecting to a computer.

Disc fragmentation isn't an issue with 2 channel audio playback. Any 7200 rpm HD with a 2Mb buffer can easily handle the task of 2 channel playback at any of the common consumer bit/sampling rates. In a recording studio where multitrack recording/playback is important, than disc upkeep becomes increasingly important. In that enviroment nearly everyone uses a dedicated HD for the music data and defragging is commonly performed. But then again, the playback of 2 audio tracks is trivial compared to the simultaneous playback of 16 tracks and the recording of 8 new tracks (with effects), a task that can be readily handled by hard disk systems.

Gunbei, you need to take into account how most people actually use their iPods. To get music into the iPod you need a computer that already has the ripped CDs. I use iTunes and the computer stored music is organized into various playlist (by artists, genre, favorite tunes, etc). When I want to transfer music to the iPod I typically select a group of playlists from the computer and wholesale replace those existing on the iPod. A month could go by before I alter the iPod again. Effectively I'm swapping 28Gb (the actual storage capacity of my 30Gb model) of data at a time. It takes 15-20 minutes for the entire process. So even though files may be written and rewritten over and over fragmentation just doesn't become a practical issue.

Cwlondon, do you have the latest firmware and software updates? Downloads are available at this site.