Quote Originally Posted by dave2010 View Post
I have an iPod classic, which I hardly ever use. However, it does hold quite a lot of CDs. I can play it through my amp and speakers via an analogue cable, but I read somewhere that it's better to use a digital dock, which apparently avoids the iPod circuitry altogether.

Has anyone tried this? Is it worth the bother anyway? For example - http://www.superfi.co.uk/index.cfm/p...roduct_ID/5625 There is another maker besides Onkyo I think, but I can't remember what it is.
Hi Dave.

Topically enough, this whole subject was part of a demo that Electric Beach and I sat through at the recent Heathrow show.

Using the headhone out put will definately seriously limit the quality if used to connect to a line in. Apart from the volume pot, inbuilt headphone amps in iPods are quite limited, plus there are impedence matching issues.

Using any straight dock will be an improvement as you're accessing a fixed, line-level feed, but this still relys on the in-built DAC which are far from brillient and ANY budget DAC would be much better.

The problem is that rather than doing as they have on iMacs or MacBooks and making the 'phone socket a combined headhone/optical digital output, access to the direct digital stream WAS pretty much prevented until recently when some companies (who had presumably had to pay Apple) started producing docks which can access the digital stream and bypass the internal DAC.

I'd recommend the Onkyo dock myself as I have one and it's really good.

I've got it hooked into my system so that if a friend comes round with an iPod and want's me to listen to something we can listen to it through my system.

If the music is on the iPod as Apple lossless, the results are pretty bloody good too.