Connecting I-pod to Integrated Amplifiers

Bignerd100 is right, just get a cable that has a 1/8 stereo mini plug on one end and dual RCA plugs on the other. Put the mini plug into the headphone jack on the iPod and the RCA's into any line-level input on your integrated.

I'm not advocating expensive cabling for that application but if that's what you want, almost every cable manufacturer is making an 'iPod' cable, some costing close to the same price as the iPod. I bought an Audioquest version from audioadvisor.com, like this but there are lots of other options. The cable isn't really iPod specific, it can be used to connect anything with a mini-jack output, like a portable CD player or another brand of mp3 player.

Marco is exactly right. The iPod is brilliantly engineered to provide extreme portability. Ultimate fidelity isn't the point at all. If you go very far down the path of optimizing the sound by eliminating the DAC and amplifier inside the iPod you wind up with, in effect, a 1" hard drive tethered to a very large chain of boxes and wires.

There's no more expensive or less reliable hard drive storage than the tiny drive inside the iPod and anyone with an iPod is going to have the music duplicated on a larger fixed drive somewhere anyway. Why not just use that drive as your digital source and set your iPod free?

Ckorody, I was not saying that cables don't matter. On the contrary, I pointed out that there may be better options that the Radio Shack cable originally suggested, including the Audioquest that I own. The original question seemed to be simply how to connect an iPod to an integrated. As this thread so abundantly points out, there is an incredible range of options if you go beyond the simplest possible solution, most of which will certainly benefit by attention to all the details, including the cable.