iPod Which MP3 player for classical music?

[Willy S]

Hi all.

I am going to purchase my first mp3 player soon, mainly for classical music that I have ripped in Apple lossless format. I care most for sound quality than other aspects of the mp3 player. I am going to purchase some nice Sennheiser headphones too.

What would you recommend? Is it true that the shuffle is better than the other Ipods in the sound quality department or was it just the 1st Gen Shuffle?

What mp3 player should I buy; an iPod or something else?

 

[Killyp]

I would either recommend an 80 gb iPod, mine sounds pretty good with Apple Lossless + nice earphones such as Sennheisers (I use the B&O ones myself).

The only MP3 player on the market I would recommend as being head and shoulders above the iPod in terms of sound quality would be the B&O BeoSound 2, but it's painful on the pocket considering it's feature count and storage (SD Card based), plus it won't play any of the Apple Formats, so you would have to convert everything to WAV or AIFF (not even sure if it will play AIFF) in order for it to play...

 

[mkrishnan]

Mmm, if you are using Apple Lossless, you don't really have a lot of choices, do you? Are you really going to use an iPod Shuffle and listen to... what... like a quarter of an opera on it? Plus if you use Apple Lossless, it's got to be an iPod, as far as I know.

However, the thing about the iPod Shuffle that you remember was, as you say, regarding the first generation Shuffle against the other iPods that existed at that time. I haven't seen a more recent replication... if there is one, that'd be very interesting.

 

[Mr. Amiga500]

Hi all.

I am going to purchase my first mp3 player soon, mainly for classical music that I have ripped in Apple lossless format. I care most for sound quality than other aspects of the mp3 player. I am going to purchase some nice Sennheiser headphones too.

What would you recommend? Is it true that the shuffle is better than the other Ipods in the sound quality department or was it just the 1st Gen Shuffle?

What mp3 player should I buy; an iPod or something else?

The iPod Shuffle doesn't play Apple Lossless. (see tech specs on Apple site)

I was pretty disgusted when I found out, but when you think about it, you'd only get about 30 pieces of lossless music on there before you ran out of space.

I also listen to Classical (baroque mainly) and I don't notice too much of a difference between lossless and M4A. I've got a Nano, but I'm waiting for a 2Gb Shuffle (2Gb is enough space for me if using M4A). I decided I don't need a display because it's useless for Classical anyway - unless you want to split up your Classical piece info into the dumb hard-coded "Song/Artist/Album" fields.