Signal from iPod as good as from department store CD player?
default -- Thu, 07/30/2009 - 18:24
I want to use my iPod Classic to store music currently on CD's, and then rout the signal from the earphone jack to an input jack on my stereo. Will the sound quality from the iPod be as good as from a standard (e.g. Sony 5 disk carousel) department store CD player?
All content, design, and layout are Copyright © 1999 - 2011 NextScreen. All Rights Reserved.
Reproduction in whole or part in any form or medium without specific written permission is prohibited.
Reproduction in whole or part in any form or medium without specific written permission is prohibited.
Maybe.
If you rip as Apple lossless or AIFF for best quality the sound will very close - and probably better if you use a WADIA dock and route the digital output into a decent DAC such as the DAC Magic.
Steven Stone
Contributor to The Absolute Sound, EnjoytheMusic.com, Vintage Guitar Magazine, and other fine publications
The iPod Classic sounds at least as good via its analog outputs as any sub-$200 CD player (provided you use lossless coding). Steven Stone is correct that you'll get vastly better sound with a Wadia 170 iTransport iPod dock to tap into the iPod's digital bitstream and decoding that bitstream with an outboard DAC.
Robert,
I am using the Wadia 170i Transport/ipod with the Berkeley DAC. I notice that the sound from this is of lesser quality than the same track played on a CD via Oppo BDP83 used as a CD transport. May be the songs didn't upload in the right format or something on the ipod. how do you check if a track is in lossless coding? when I click info for the song it tells where its located and everything seems to be listed as .m4a file. What is the file name of apple lossless files?
Also when you compare songs played from the Wadia i Transport VS. a CD transport what were your thoughts? Does a CD player as a Transport sound better than the iTransport/ipod when played through the berkeley?
.m4a files are Apple Lossless format.
As for the BDP83's files, unless you specifically burned a disk at a different bit rate than a CD, those are AIFF/WAV files. If your comparing a commercial CD to the iPod's AIFF files the playing field's not quite level.
It may be that the Berkeley DAC does a better job decoding WAV/AIFF files than it does with Apple Lossless.
One way to tell whether this is the case would be to rip one disk in both AIFF and Apple lossless (in the preferences section of iTUnes you can change the format that iTunes imports discs in), put the files on your iPod and compare the files played through the iPod to the Wadia and into your Berkeley DAC. The only variable would be the files themselves.
Let me know what you hear...
Steven Stone
Contributor to The Absolute Sound, EnjoytheMusic.com, Vintage Guitar Magazine, and other fine publications
Is there any value to using a Wadia 170 (or some other alternative to get a digital signal out of an MP3 player) decoded into an outboard DAC if the ripped files aren't in lossless format.....for example decent quality VBR?
That's a pretty broad question. I can only speak about the iPod because that is what I have had personal experience with.
With an iPod if you use 320 BPS MP3 files you will hear an improvement over the built-in analog using an alternative method to extract digital files to a high-grade DAC. Below 320 there's no sonic advantage or point to doing this.
Steven Stone
Contributor to The Absolute Sound, EnjoytheMusic.com, Vintage Guitar Magazine, and other fine publications