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In Reply to: How can I connect iPod to a tube amp? posted by Song Gao on February 17, 2007 at 12:42:07:
Ugh. I would suggest not bothering. I have an iPod that I listen to only in non-critical listening situations (mainly airplanes). Even then, I find myself having a difficult time with the poor quality of the sound. If you attempt to use it as a home system source - especially with a 300B amp - I suspect you may toss your cookies.
Follow Ups:
I would never use my iPod as a home source, but the occasional suggestion that the sound is so bad that it's hard to listen to when out and about makes no sense to me at all. I always find it completely up to the task of providing musical enjoyment when out and about or traveling. Some of you either have hearing that's much more acute than mine or you are achieving some sort of placebo effect with your iPods!
With Ipod you can either take the Line Out signal from the top (headphones) or from the bottom. If you buy a special cord to get the Line Out from the bottom (or buy a PcketDock) the signal coming out of Ipod sounds pretty darn good.'Also, you can tweak your computer to make Ipod sound better, or even gat all your music files from a laptop and into Ipod. Getting music files from a battery powered source has really 'woken up' my Ipod.
taking the signal from the top of Ipod kinda sucks, then you have 2 volume knobs in the signal path...lots more grunge.
I always have two or three iPods with me when traveling... could not imagine life without them - but then I listen to music, not sounds. I guess something's wrong with me too... :-)
There could be 2 things at work here. First is headphones. I am using the new Sony top-line noise cancelling. They have fairly decent specs, although they are certainly no Grado. When the noise cancelling function is on, these Sony's have a 104dB (or 114dB - I can't remember off the top of my head) sensivity, so they may be more revealing than other 'phones. Second, the recording format has a big impact as well. I admit - as a less than expert iPod user - I simply used the default setting. I am finding out that the default emphasizes storage space over sound quality. I have not tried the higher quality recording file type, so that could also be a big factor. What I know for sure is that with my 'phones and recording format, I sometimes can't listen to certain songs.
And it's still bad. I do use the ipod for convenience, but I've brought back the old walkman for use at home.An added bonus, unlike the ipod/iTunes interface, when loading a new CD in the walkman, if I pressing the wrong button I will not wipe out my whole CD library.
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