Best Portable Digital Device

I'm old school. iRiver still makes a very good portable CD player which blasts the iPod/mp3 compressed sound. It will drive the Etymotics easily enough. One model even has a digital out for a DAC. They are very suprising even when plugged into a home system.

Good advice from both Ehart and Marco. The combination of the iPod and iTunes is elegant, easy and powerful. There's no one right answer about the size of the iPod and the amount of compression, or lack of compression.

It's a good idea to always rip your CD's to your computer hard drive with lossless compression so that you're preserving the full quality and the flexibility to make copies at one of the lower quality mp3 bit rates with smaller file sizes to see what combination of quality, music choice and portability suits you on the iPod.

Like Marco, I keep Apple lossless files on a 60 Gb iPod and listen to it with Sennheiser PX200 headphones but I also have one of the new, tiny iPod shuffles with copies of some of those same files at 128 kbps and a pair of Sony earbuds. Those rigs represent the extremes of size and sonic quality and what works for you might be somewhere in between, like an 8 Gb Nano that Ehart recommends with mp3 files at 320 kbps.

I'm not opposed to an 8Gb iPOD, but how do I go about downloading as a "lossless" file? My Dell PC and Palm Pilot give me no choices that I know of. Will iTunes give me that option or do I have to download "lossless" software from the internet or is it something that I have to buy? If so, is it available from Best Buy? As you can see from my questions, I am indeed lost on this matter.

Folks,

I found a previous thread in the forum that answers my questions. Much thanks.