Is an IPOD hi-fi?

An iPod is just a small, portable hard drive with some software installed to manage music files. What the output of the iPod sounds like depends completely on the fidelity of the bits you put on the hard drive and what you choose to do with them as they come off the hard drive.

If you play mp3 files ripped at low bit rates through the headphone jack you're going to get low-fi, or maybe mid-fi, depending on the bit rate and your own standards for reproduction.

If you play lossless files through the line-out connection, then through an external DAC with good jitter control, most people would certainly consider what they're hearing hi-fi.

The point is that your question is impossible to answer because it makes the same sense as asking the question, "Is a speaker hi-fi?"

Marco, of course, I agree with you completely, I think we're actually making the same point. Focusing on just the bits or just the medium that stores them doesn't tell you anything useful about the quality of the music that comes out at the end of the chain of reconstruction of real music from those bits.

In these threads about whether iPods are hi-fi I often get the sense that some posters have the odd notion that CD's, or even vinyl albums, contain actual music. The image I have is that they believe there is a tiny but completely real orchestra embedded in the little shiny disc and that pushing 'Play' is the cue for the tiny orchestra to start.

A CD is just a cheap, small, reasonably durable storage medium for digital information, for bits. An iPod is another way to store the bits and as a friend of mine in IT once said, 'bits is bits.'