Can Anyone Please Walk Me Through This?

Sorry if my earlier post come off sounding like I was bashing you. It just seems to me that you're being unrealistic with what the iPod is capable of doing. Just my opinion.

You're real lucky that you Porsche/Nakamichi has a front panel aux input. It makes hooking up the iPod much easier. I'm reduced to using a cassette adapter or an add-on FM transmitter. Both work, but neither is a particularly elegant solution.

Whether or not you can hear a difference between various data compression formats is highly dependent upon the type of music being auditioned. My experience is that current production pop/rock recordings, i.e. heavy dynamically compressed recordings, are virtually indistinguishable from their originals when compressed to MP3 type formats. I say virtually because on my main system I still can detect a loss of imagining/soundstaging information. It's a subtle loss of info, but it is readily audible. In the car it's not a factor.

No we do not all agree. Not as a personal attack, but you seem overly rigid in your position, so much so that I question why you're even bothering with an iPod.

I agree that MP3 style compression is not high end audio, but I still argue that for certain types of music (modern pop/rock/country) the sonic losses are quite small. Also, it's not unreasonable to argue that due to their high background noise levels that any car system is not high end. If the car system can't be high end, then why quibble over whether the source is high end enough?

I use an Apple computer with my iPod and primarily use AIFF type files. AIFF is Apple's version of a WAV and it uses no compression whatsoever. iTunes automatically tags the files with album/song data and that info is easily transferred to the iPod. I have never experienced any buffer or skipping problems with my iPod and this includes the playback of several single songs that last more than an hour.

Regarding battery life -- yes, using uncompressed files will shorten usable battery life due to the greater use of the hard drive. I've read that the battery in 3 series iPod can sustain approximately 400 charge/discharge cycles. Obviously you're better off not letting your iPod fully discharge. At home you should always leave it plugged in. In a car you should use any of the readily available third party supplied lighter adapter chargers. There are also add on battery packs that claim to more than double the usable discharge time of the iPod. Worse comes to worse, Apple will replace dead batteries for $99 installed.

With a 30Gb iPod using AIFF files I typically achieve 5-6 hours battery life and can store 650 songs. When I really want to load up a lot of music I copy the selected files to AAC (192kbps, mono) and then can store nearly 4,000 songs on the iPod. Mono works for me since I would only listen in the car and stereo information just isn't important
to me in such an environment.

Your next to last paragraph perplexes me. By design an iPod is not a high end oriented device. It's a convenience, lifestyle oriented product. I know that there are some audiophile who use their iPods with expensive cables and there's probably somebody out there contemplating how they can cryo theirs, but I still maintain it's not being entirely realistic to hold the iPod up to high end standards. For what it is the iPod is a great product, but you have to accept it for what it is. If you require true high end sound quality in a digital portable playback system you might want to consider one of the various Nagra products.

My comments regarding sound quality comparisons were based upon listening through my bedroom system (Panasonic XR45 receiver, Sony SM7 speakers with a Apple G5 computer via optical cable as the source).