iPod headphone to RCA jacks adapter cable

If all you want is a well-made cable you can get those from Blue Jeans Cables, Audioquest or even Monster. However, there are a couple of options to using the headphone jack you should consider if you want to get the best out of the iPod.

An iPod dock with a line-out jack would bypass the internal amplifier of the iPod, letting you plug the 3.5mm stereo mini to RCA cable into the dock and then to your amp. There are lots of docks available but you can pick up a genuine Apple brand dock on ebay for less than $10 and be in business.

You'd get even better sound using one of the docks that take the digital signal from the iPod, bypassing both the internal amp and internal DAC. Onkyo, Cambridge Audio, Wadia and others make them at various price levels. One I've heard highly recommended is the Pure i20, one of the least expensive of the digital docks at around $90.

Sar67- please explain what you mean by "re-uploading the iTune songs." In what format now are the songs you would be uploading? CDs, mp3, higher resolution downloads?

If the songs are already in mp3 format you won't gain anything by converting them to Apple lossless, they'll just be larger files that take up more room on your iPod but won't give you any better sonic quality. If you're re-ripping CDs into Apple lossless you'll get the same quality as CD at about half the file size, which is a good thing on a small iPod hard drive.

The Apple tech gave you good information. It isn't quite true that you don't have room for any lossless files on your Nano but you won't be able to put many CDs on a drive that size.

Apple Lossless files take up about half as much space as the standard AIFF files on a CD but even at that you would have room for no more than 10 or 12 CDs, possibly fewer depending on the album lengths.

Yes, you do need to re-rip from the CD to get CD-quality sound. When you ripped the files at 128 kbps you threw away a lot of information and it's not possible to recover that by reprocessing those files to a different format. You'd get bigger files but they wouldn't sound any better.

If you are set on using the Nano and you want a large music collection on it a compromise might be to re-rip at a higher mp3 bit rate, like 320 kbps. It won't be CD quality but will let you put a lot more tunes on the Nano and they'll sound somewhat better than the low resolution files you now have on there.

If you want maximum quality playback and you want a lot of music accessible you'll definitely want an iPod with a much, much larger drive.

Please explain why you couldn't get the i20 to work.Describe in detail all the pieces of your setup, including the cables. It's hard to give you advice about what to do next without knowing what the issue is.