[Audio Empire]

On Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:49:55 -0700, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message


Well, the ipod Touch is basically "portable music" as far
as I'm concerned, and no more.

The sound quality of portable audio gear has improved dramatically since the
days of portable AM (and even FM) radios.

Really? A champion of the obvious, are we?

I don't expect this device
or the music ripped to it to be any better than previous
"portable" formats such as cassette.

If one listens or checks technical performance, one finds that previous
portable formats such as cassette are beneath comparison to mainstream
portable digital players.

That's one opinion. Cassettes have DIFFERENT limitations, that's for sure,
but the end result is less than satisfactory for both.

So without any high
expectations, I find my ability to plug my iPod into my
daily-driver's car stereo to be a boon.

If you do that via a direct connnection, then with good choices of files on
your iPod, the results will be CD quality which is to say sonically limited
by the speakers and room, etc.

To have all that drowned by the car noise? Not necessary, and not even
audible under the circumstances. In my home system, I use an AppleTV
connected to my outboard upsampling DAC. I agree that my ALC ripped CDs are
CD quality, But I wasn't talking about in-house, I was talking about the
convenience of using my iPod Touch in combination with my car stereo to give
me portable access to (some of) my music collection.

Car audio quality
is an oxymoron at best in my estimation because of the
high background noise levels.

Agreed.

For instance, I find that
XM/Sirius radio is quite listenable in the car, where I
cannot stand it in the house and my iPod touch sounds
very good in that context.

I did a 2 day trip in a recent GM "crossover" with a XM-based audio system.
It was clearly audibly deficient even with the vehicle in motion over rough
roads, as compared to playback of of a randomly-selected CD.

Then either that GM car stereo is better than my VW's or the the GM's XM
receiver is worse than mine, because I find XM/Sirius to be quite listenable
in the car and notice little difference between it and a CD played on the
same stereo.

BTW, I can hear the difference between lossless and MP3
on headphones, and don't like the MP3 artifacts.

It is well known that properly-made MP3s are usually difficult or impossible
to reliably detect in comparisons with the CDs they were made from in
level-matched, time-synched, bias-controlled listening tests.

Good for you. I hope that bit of dogma makes you happy. Personally, I don't
buy it. I can HEAR the artifacts. So can a lot of people.

Therefore I use ALC for all my ripped music.

Fact of the matter is that the last digital music player I loaded was loaded
primarily with .wav files.

Wave files aren't compressed at all, either content-wise or data-wise.