iPod iPod Choices & Problems

[Tonerl]

I intend to buy a portable player because I have about 400 disks of classical music and find that I don't listen to it enough with normal hi-fi. A portable player would make the various items much more accessible. I had narrowed the choice to the iPod classic and the iPod touch 32GB but:

1 I'm wary of hard-disk devices (e.g., classic) because they seem fragile to me. This made the touch seems the better bet as it's flash-based.

2 I've read that the classic's buffer is too small to handle the sort of long movements that Bruckner and Mahler (to name but two!) go in for.

3 To make matters worse, I've now come across postings about hiss on the classic but much worse on the touch, especially when using good-quality 'phones!

Any helpful advice would be welcome. TIA.

 

[Tonerl]

This was not 'trolling'! I own, and am very pleased with, a 24" iMac.

My questions were genuine.

Today, I visited the Apple Store in Milton Keynes and listened to both the touch and the classic on ear-covering headphones. The shop was too noisy to hear any background hiss but my wife and I were impressed with the sound quality of both iPods. There was a Classical item on both iPods but its movements were too short for me to tell whether the buffer problem affects the classic.

I have now ordered a 32GB iPod touch.

Thank you for your interest.

 

[dubhe]

I have an iPod classic and some of my albums are music mixes which include the whole album as one long track, to avoid the problems with changing tracks when they have all been 'mixed' together. Some of these 'tracks' are over an hour long but I never have any problems.

I listen with Bose and B&O headphones, excellent sound quality.