Is an IPOD hi-fi?

Ferrari ... what was the encoding format of the music ? It makes all the difference. Lossless and 192kbps AAC sound pretty good through my sennheiser cans.

128kbps MP3 on the other hand sounds absolutely terrible.

So intelligent that he can't answer my question. What type of encoding did you listen to ? Apple lossless ? WAV ? AAC 192 ? AAC 128 ? MP3 128 ?

Ferrari, I have to correct you on the contents being $25.

Modern electronics is largely software, and software is not free. Perhaps the BOM for the hardware is $25, but it's evident to me that a significant effort went into the software both on the ipod and on the Mac/PC platforms, and in the itunes website. A large part of apples' success is because it all "just works". Many of their competitors sell nice products, but getting them to work is a nightmare. Do you think they should give away their software ?

And, last, if people felt it did not represent value they would not buy it. I think that BMWs represent terrible value in a car, and I prefer a Toyota. Does that make all BMW drivers dumb ? No, they just have different interests and priorities to me.

Albert, if the RIAA were doing their job we could rent music and then pay an ownership fee if we wanted to keep it. With practically all other products I am able to return it if I really don't like it, but with CD's I'm supposed to fork over $15 and hope that the album I'm buying isn't a couple of cool tracks and a bunch of turkeys.

The RIAA gave people virtually no legal way to sample music, and now they're paying the price.

Planckscale, I've been travelling on business for the past 10 days. This leaves two options:

1) No music
2) ipod + Sennheiser HD280pro

Since #2 cost me all of $200 for heaphones and refurb ipod and sounds indistinguishable in quality from my panasonic portable CD player what's not to like about option #2?

A hifi forum is the perfect place for a discussion of mobile audio players, different codecs and bit rates, and headphones.