Would A DAC Help Very Much?

look at the pure i-20 for 99 dollars. you will never listen to an ipod thru the headphone jack or it's on -board dac thru your stereo again. and to your question if you want to make an average cd player sound better or use computer audio my answer is yes. brw, i also use morrow cables thru out my system with mmgs and i think they are really nice.

You'll probably hear a good difference using a better source like a DAC. However, make sure you can get a digital signal out of your iPod before you buy a DAC. Very, very few items get the digital signal from iPods.

For a DAC and iPod dock 1 piece solution, look into the Peachtree iDAC. It's about $1k. Haven't heard it, so no comment. A lot of people like the Peachtree stuff, hence my recommending researching it.

HRT just released an iPod compatable DAC thing. Haven't heard HRT either, but a lot of people I know really like the sound for the dollar in their other stuff.

i guess i wasn't detailed about the pure i-20. it does get the digital data from the ipod and is a ipod authorized product . like kbarkamian wrote, very few ipod docks do this. the few i am aware of are the hrt, the wadia, the cambridgeaudio and the peachtree. the pure i-20 has a dac installed and the ability to bypass their dac and use the your seperate dac. it also has optical and digital coax out plus video out. the improvement i hear is better sound quality, better bass definition and sound like a good cd player not a compromised ipod.

Actually, I listen to the music directly from my computer. It has a mini jack audio output in the back, and the Morrow cable goes directly from it to the aux input in the back of the receiver. I love the ease that iTunes allows me to play music. When I finally get my system, I plan on using a computer for the main source of music.

Paul, simple yet effective setup is computer usb connected to dac into your amp/integrated etc. use puremusic app with Itunes and an outboard hard drive to store your music....suggest a backup hard drive to protect all the time it took to load your cd library...better sounding setup than any cd player I've owned and I've owned some $5K plus players.

Thank you all very much!!

I use an Apogee Duet in one system and an Apogee Mini-DAC in another. The Mini-DAC is discontinued. Both it and the Duet use a FireWire connection and many say this is better adapted to audio than USB. In any case, I will attest to the great improvement in sound I got in going from the Mac's own sound output to an external converter. I've tried a few and the Apogees are great-sounding, trouble-free and will play hi-res files to boot.