Fishbone

I have a pretty old school set up in some ways...source unit is an 6-CD Alpine changer with a digital output. Sound is great but flexibility is obviously limited. I am looking at going the iPod Classic route with a new Alpine head unit to make life easier. I don't, however, want to sacrifice sound quality. I know I can save all of my songs on my iPod in Apple lossless (have done this on iTunes for my high end home set up). However, I have heard that the iPod Classic does not have a digital output. Is this true? Would I be sacrificing sound quality by moving to the iPod set up?

Thanks to all.

LC

Denonite

iTrader: (1)

Some of the new units have direct digital usb input now, and bypass the ipod's dac using the head unit's dac, most of which are burr brown 24 bit dac or similar. Up to last year it was not available unless you chose an ipod only deck, like the iDA x100. The new cda 117 and 105 are both usb direct digital cd receivers. I'm looking at doing the same thing, as most of my music is in apple lossless format as well, but I still need a cd player for mix discs from friends on occasion. My current set up uses the pre-amp level adapter which sounds as good as the original cds when I A/B them, but the audio level is about 3-5 dB's lower...which bugs me.

Fishbone

Thanks for the input...I am very interested in this. I hate to make the investment without knowing how it will compare to my current set up, however, I may just have to make the leap and give it a shot.

Denonite

iTrader: (1)

well I can say I'm very happy with my current set up which is a cda-9833 and kca -420i ipod adapter (allows the charging and integration of an ipod with an ai-net deck). This combination used the dock connector from the ipod which basically sent the ipod's pre-amp level analog signal to the deck's aux input and allowed the control of the ipod via the deck through the ipod's connections. SO, my feeling is that if the ipod's analog outputs sound as good as they do with this set up, then it can only sound better with a digital bitstream going directly into the cda-117's 24 bit burr brown DAC as they are very highly regarded DACs. I'm thinking of grabbing one soon myself as soon as the price drops a bit.

Natban

Hey Fishbone, I just went through the same thing you're going through now. I'm almost finished me rebuild, stereo is up and running just not tuned yet. I decided to go with the Alpine IDA-x305 with digital usb output from the ipod to the deck (24bit Burrbrown DAC). SQ was always great with this thing (running for about 2 months). All my CD's are ripped to Itunes with apple losses (ALAC) and if I were to aquire some songs in a shaddy manner (downloads??, of course that's illegal so I would never do that) I would download the music in Free Audio Losses Codec (FLAC, which seems to be quite widly used) and convert to Windows Media Audio (WMA), which is also a losses format, using a free program like Media Monkey or something and then import those WMA's to Itunes. Itunes does not support WMA but will convert them to ALAC when importing. After 2 months with this HU I have not missed CD's one bit and I'm quite happy I never have to deal with them in my car anymore.

The IDA-X305 has a beautiful 2.2" full color screen on it and great ipod controls. Like I said I was most impressed with the SQ, way better then the last 9885 HU I had used and better than my old CDA-9811 (when comparing apples to apples). The CDA-9811 did have TA adjustments and better crossovers though.

Now that my new install is up and running I have added the PXA-h100 and ohhhhh baby it sounds gooood! All the tuning features are there now.

No supprise but recommend the x305. CD's are old fashioned and you wont miss them, you'll just need to do some research about digital music formats and losses qualities.

Jaloosk

iTrader: (1)

Or you could just Rockbox your iPod and play flac natively...

Rockbox - Open Source Jukebox Firmware

Denonite

iTrader: (1)

Only you know if you'll miss cd capability. I have to have it, when friends and family have a disc with tunes they want to hear on a night out, it's kind of embarrassing to have all that fancy equipment and not be able to pop a cd in. Most of my dj buddies do their mixes on the computer now, but still do demo discs for us as most people still have cd players. Only you know if you need it or not.

Natban

One of the things I like about ALAC is that it is "mathamatically" losless, where FLAC and WMA are "completely" losless. For arguments sake I'll say that songs from a CD ripped using WMA or FLAC is about 50MB then when converted to ALAC they are about 23MB (still 100% sound quality), a typical 128kbs MP3 song might be 4MB.

This means that on my 60GB Ipod Classic I have about 1200 songs, mostly ALAC however some I could only get in a 320kbs or 256kbs MP3 fromat, and it uses up about 31GB of space. Had I left them in FLAC my Ipod would be almost full.

I'm no expert on this stuff so I do stand to be corrected but this is what I've found so far and I'm happy with the resaults.

Denonite

iTrader: (1)

"lossless" is what it says, it just uses a compression algorithm that knows to replace certain bits when expanded...it's like saying count from 1-10, but we'll give you 3, 7 and 9. It's easy for the processor to plug in the missing numbers to give you the full set. Same principle with the lossless codec, and zipped files where no assumption as to the data can be made...it has to be 100% the same as original when expanded otherwise the program would not run properly.

Jaloosk

iTrader: (1)

FLAC FTMFW. Hard drives are getting bigger by the second. I'm still waiting for a manufacturer to step in with a FLAC-enabled deck outta the box.