Experience with portable "mp3" devices

Or if you want to get more serious click the link below-

HeadRoom

Steve

I think that compression is a huge issue. They all sounded like crap to me until I decided to waste space and go lossless. $50 headphones make a huge difference too. I just got a Sansa Clip for my daughter and it sounds great with lossless.

Srwooten - thanks great link.

Loomis- The Cowon players have a remarkable SNR andplay wav files, so may be the ticket, nice one. Also, have to say, loving the price tag on your headphone suggestions.

Some great headphones to be had, at a reasonable price.
Reminds me of my all time fav pair, what i thought were just cheapo $50 sonys, but brought every piece of music I owned to life. They turned out to be like the candy you had as a kid, but now being an adult all the new stuff just doesn't taste the same.

In terms of mp3 brands - I would check out iRiver. I think their players sound better than the usual crap. I have recently migrated to a Slacker G2 which sounds as bad as the rest of them. However, I agree that the quality of the headphones you use makes a HUGE difference. I recently purchased a pair of Audio Technica ATH-ESW9a headphones. Their musicality makes me almost forget that I am missing a huge chunk of what I would normally be able to hear through my regular system.

#1: don't put compressed music onto your portable player. No matter how good of a player you can find, the music will sound like junk.

#2: buy good headphones, for portable, I like canal phones. Recently got a pair of Westone's that I really like, but they are fairly expensive ($350-400 or something). I get them at cost (about 50% off) as my wife is an audiologist.

#3: look into a decent headphone amplifier (portable), there are many very good ones (I personally use headroom), but there are others just as good. Check out the headfi.org site for a lot more info. on this and the best matching headphones based on your music and sound preferences.

#4: Go out and buy 2 500+ gig portable hard drives. Rip all of your CD's in full resolution. Borrow your friends CDs and rip those too. Now make some friends (on this site or others) and send out your second hard drive with all the ripped high res music. They copy your files and add all their own high res music back onto the drive. Your music collection multiplies quickly and since you are probably like most of us bying 50+ CDs per year anyway, you really shouldn't feel all that bad. Plus, you will find great new music and likely want to go out and buy those discs as well.