Do I need a DAC for iPod?

good pt facten. if you want the best sound quality you must go into settings on itunes and set it up right. i use aiff and error correction on and my ipod is a great source. jeff, maybe go to computer audiophile for some articles on this for more information.

If you want to use BOTH the iPad and the iPod to stream music, then I would suggest an Apple Airport Express.

You can connect the airport express directly to your amp line ins using supplied cable.

The sound will not be that great since the DAC used in the Airport Express is medicore at best, but it will work great.

Further down the road you can invest into some high quality DAC and utilise Airport Express TosLink digital out instead of the analog outs. You need a DAC with a with high jitter rejection though (to supress jitter present on Airport Express TosLink digital out), so you need something of current vintage (certainly no legacy dacs) - Arcam rDAC, Musical Fidelity V-DACmk2 / M1 DAC etc.

You can also get one of the iPod docks available (Wadia i171 springs to mind) but then you will not have the wireless capability. Sound wise the dock will be slightly better though.

Great advice, but ouch! $650 for a wireless transport for my iPad or iPod music. One thing I need to be careful of, that I do not spend $4k on a system and not be able to enjoy the best I can out of it. Wireless control from a iPhone, etc. does sound pretty cool though too!

right, pure offers 30 day guarantee as does music direct and audio advisor on the units they sell.

I'm not sure if there's still any floating around, but you may want to try finding an Apple TV Gen 1. The have an internal hard drive that can store your music on (limited to 160 gb). Since you have iTunes and iPad etc, you can control it wirelessly with the remote app. No need for the computer to be running.

Or you can get an Apple TV 2, and do almost the same thing. Problem is the ATV2 doesn't have the internal hard drive, so you'd have to stream to it, either from your computer or through AirPlay (not sure exactly how that one works).

The second issue I have with the ATV2 is that it outputs everything at 48 instead of the native 44.1. That tells me it's changing the music slightly. Not sure if it's truly audible or not, but it rubs me the wrong way.

With either, you're best off using an internal DAC. The analog outs aren't anything to write home about.

I'm a huge fan of the ATV1. I currently have the majority of my music synched to its hard drive as Apple Lossless, control it with my iPhone 3Gs, and run it's optical output into a Rega DAC. Sounds excellent to my ears. Everything is self contained, no computers need to be running, I don't have to worry about wireless issues, and so on. And as I'm sure you know, Apple stuff is so easy to use.

I wouldn't trade my ATV and iPhone setup for any other server right now. It just flat out works and sounds great.