The compression used by iPods can be MP3 or AAC (M4A container) or Apple Lossless. In principle, no lossy compression is as accurate as PCM. But as a longtime audiophile and professional classical musician, I would defy anyone to tell the audible difference between my AACs or MP3s and the WAVs from which they were encoded in controlled, double-blind ABX testing. So I would argue that a difference which MAKES no difference IS no difference - at least from a practical point of view. Before hackles rise... Notice I said MY AACs or MP3s. If you are using the Apple iTunes Store's downloads as your benchmark, I would agree with you. But I encode my own, using the Compaact! encoder at 320 kbs or the highest possible variable bitrate, not the 128kbs or 192kbs (most people achieve transparency to their satisfaction on most music at 192 kbs) distributed by Apple for downloads. For MP3s I encode with LAME 3.96 at a constant 320kbs rate. At that bitrate I cannot consistently tell the difference between the resulting MP3s and the original PCM WAVs even with harpsichord, which is particularly vulnerable to compression artifacts. By contrast, most encoders' default bit rate is 128kbs and that is what most people use - good enough for typically overproduced pop and hip-hop junk maybe, but not for jazz or classical or anything else that calls for sonic cleanliness. [As for the playback through the iPod itself, that is another issue entirely. It speaks NOT to the quality of the music encoding process, but to the quality of the playback mechanism, electronics and software in the player.] If I want compression but don't want LOSSY compression, I use FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Compression). I would NEVER use Apple Lossless, because it is a proprietary Apple format that no one else in the galaxy supports and no one else ever WILL support, because as is typical for Apple, they refuse to license the codec to anyone. Apple Lossless files cannot be played on anything but an iPod or a Windows XP or MacOS computer that has iTunes installed. That's a deal-breaker. My problem with MiniDisc as a portable music player is that it is firmly locked into ATRAC, a Sony proprietary format with NO support beyond Sony and MiniDisc. Sony has chosen to include no native support in MiniDisc for MP3, AAC or any other compression algorithm. As a purely recording medium, this is not fatal. But Sony IS actively promoting and selling the MiniDisc not only as a recording medium but as a viable medium for portable music players. If you want to transfer some MP3's to your minidisc player for listening on the go, they are transcoded from MP3 to ATRAC before being saved onto the minidisc. This transcoding DOES create audible problems with the music - to my ears at least. It is a generally accepted principle that transcoding - or essentially superimposing one codec upon another - can severely affect the music by multiplying and enhancing the artifacts of each. On the stupid cheap little earbuds that everybody tosses in with portable players, it may not be an issue, but on the $250 ones I use, IT IS! [in the analog days, some poor ignorant souls thought using Dolby Noise Reduction in conjunction with DBX would achieve the Holy Grail of the hissless audio tape. Like in the transcoding example above, they were superimposing one compression-expansion curve upon another. BAD IDEA!] Now, if my music portable uses minidiscs, I can get around that issue by simply encoding all my music in ATRAC in the first place using SoundStage. But there again, I have the "Apple problem" - those files will NEVER be usable on anything else but a minidisc player! Or on a computer with SoundStage installed. If I HAVE to use SoundStage to get my files off my computer and into my minidisc player, that is bad enough, but I WILL NOT USE IT to play, encode or organize my music! Or I can simply use straight PCM WAVs. ANY player supports that! Two problems: One gigabyte is just not enough room if I am going to use WAVs. One CD of music per disc? I am not willing to carry a bulging pocketful of minidiscs! Worse, I STILL have to use wretched SoundStage to get the files onto them! And with USB, at a glacial pace to boot for those HUGE files. The hassle is almost enough to make me throw up my hands, surrender and buy an iPod with all the other millions of sheeple out there. Indeed, SoundStage is almost a deal-breaker just by itself. It's more complex than it needs to be, it's kludgy, it's unstable and it's just ugly to look at. IF Sony absolutely MUST insist on transcoding MP3s instead of providing proper native support for them, why not make the transcoding software resident in the portable player's firmware? Since I am pleading with Sony, I might as well stay on my knees and beg for the immediate deepsixing of SoundStage in favor of something clean and elegant - like iTunes or Windows Media Player 10. Or, better yet, instead of re-inventing the wheel, just provide software plug-ins so minidiscs can be loaded from iTunes or WAP or even MusicMatch? Or, EVEN better yet, WHY not allow the computer's operating system to mount the minidisc player like it would any removable disc like a floppy or a zip? That way, putting music on your player becomes a simple drag-and-drop. As others here have related, MiniDisc has some great advantages as a portable music player medium over HD players. But Sony is utterly hamstringing MiniDisc by compromising the quality of music files loaded onto them through transcoding and by forcing us to use a software package that makes the process of using the player unnecessarily complicated and just plain un-fun.
