Is an IPOD hi-fi?

Planckscale, this forum is under Misc Audio. Once it gets to Digital or Amps/Preamps section, then be alarmed.

Keep your mind open as well, not only your ears.

Although I dont have an IPOD why cant a music lover enjoy the thumb drive for what it is, then have Audiophile performance at home.....isnt this all about loving music?

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.

My bad!

I guess I was taken by the enthusiasm and passion displayed by the respondents, and not realizing it was a discussion under "miscellaneous audio”. I hope to "hear" from you all on the other critical audiophile forums.

In these threads about whether iPods are hi-fi I often get the sense that some posters have the odd notion that CD's, or even vinyl albums, contain actual music. The image I have is that they believe there is a tiny but completely real orchestra embedded in the little shiny disc and that pushing 'Play' is the cue for the tiny orchestra to start.

A CD is just a cheap, small, reasonably durable storage medium for digital information, for bits. An iPod is another way to store the bits and as a friend of mine in IT once said, 'bits is bits.'