Prima Luna Prolog 1 and ipod

For the best sound quality you'd want to bypass the DAC and amplifier inside the iPod by connecting it to one of the external docks that pick up the digital information directly from the drive in the iPod. Then you're getting the music at the resolution of the original file, which can be anything from a low-resolution mp3 to full CD or higher resolution. At that point the iPod is just a storage device with an interface for selecting the music.

Several companies make docks, Wadia was the first but there are a number of them out there now. I haven't heard the PURE i-20 but it's fairly inexpensive and has had good reviews here.

How are you getting a digital signal out of the ipod? There are a few iPod docks that will take a digital signal from the iPod and pass it on to a DAC but as far as I know you can get only an analog signal using just a cable from either the dock connector on the iPod or the headphone jack.

No, it wasn't ignorant, figuring out the connection options among the universe of devices isn't easy or intuitive. But, if you do want to get a digital signal from the iPod so you can connect directly to the digital input of your player you'll need a device like the Pure i-20 mentioned in an earlier post or one of the other similar devices from Wadia, Cambridge Audio and others.

They don't convert the output of the iPod to a digital signal, they take the digital information that's stored on the iPod and route it to the DAC in your Quad player before it passes through the DAC and amp that are built into the iPod.

One notch back from that in terms of sonic quality is to use a dock or cable that sends a 'line out' analog signal to the input of a preamp or integrated. That signal will have been converted from digital to analog by the iPod's internal DAC but not sent through the amp-on-a-chip that's in the iPod.

Another consideration is the resolution of the files on the iPod. If you have low bit rate mp3 files on the iPod they're never going to sound like CD or higher resolution files no matter how you extract them from the iPod.

As an aside, I love the iPod, iPad, iPhone, iTouch devices, I think I own six or seven of them, but expecting a device that's designed completely around portability and convenience to sound as good as high resolution files on a music server or even a CD player seems unrealistic to me. And the pursuit of that is a waste of money, from my experience.

I don't have any experience with the Quad players but according to the owner's manual the CDP-S player does not have any digital inputs but the CDP-2 player has both optical and coax digital inputs.

If you have the CDP-S you won't be able to use it between the Pure I-20 and your preamp, you would plug the analog outputs of the I-20 into line inputs on your preamp.

If you have the CDP-2, though, you could send either the optical or coax output of the I-20 to one of the digital inputs of the CDP-2 and then connect one of the analog outputs of the CDP-2 to your preamp. That way you would be bypassing the built-in DAC of the I-20 and using the one in the CDP-2 instead.

With the CDP-2, whether the optical or the coax digital output of the I-20 sounds better as a digital source, and whether the I-20 DAC or the Quad DAC sounds better, is just a matter of listening.

Good luck.