Phil Ford+FeelAudio Arts for Future Creatures.

iPod High End Audio – Are You Getting the Best Sound From Your Digital Music Files?

This article is for people who love the sound of their iPod with a great pair of earphones, but are unsatisfied with the other ways they have to play their music on their iPods in their homes.

Let’s face it; the iPod has changed the world of music playback as we know it. Who do you know who does NOT use some form of music storage device to enjoy their favorite artists? A great set of earphones and an iPod can recreate a very pleasing experience, but for most of us, the question is, how can we enjoy that same level of quality throughout our homes that is offered by the earphone experience?

Many iPod docking stations have come on the market that allow one to drop their iPod into a dock that provides some sort of small speaker system. In 99% of the cases, these docking systems do not even come close to the earphone experience. Even the best ones out there are a far cry away from how a decent stereo system sounds.

Yes, a good old-fashioned stereo is the first step in getting the music on your iPod to sound good on something other than your earphones. The great news is, the stereo business is still alive and kicking. Find a local audio specialist and they can open your ears to all kinds of great solutions for listening to music. Then, all you need to do is connect the docking station to a stereo input with a simple audio cable and you have hit level 1 in enjoying your digital music!

The real key if you want the best sound requires getting back to the source of the music. For all of us, the music on our iPods landed on our computer in the first place. The first step is to make sure the music gets to our computers in the best possible form. If you are putting your legacy CD collection on your computer, be sure to set up iTunes to rip in Apple Lossless.

This will capture much more of the music on those discs than the default setting of 128kbs. It’s under the advanced tabs in the preferences menu. This will take up more space on your hard drive, but space is so cheap these days, the difference in sound is well worth the extra storage.

Once you have your music stored in digital form, there are lots of new options for playing it back that can surpass the earphone experience. That good ole fashioned stereo is step 1, but now the fun begins. Imagine having all of your music available essentially in the palm of your hand!

If your stereo is also used for your home theater, one really simple option is to pick up an Apple TV. You will have to point the Apple TV to the computer or computers your music is stored on, but its pretty simple if you are a bit network savvy. The music came to your computer in digital form, and your home theater system should have the ability to decode those digits into music. The Apple TV has a digital output that is the format called Toslink or SPDIF. You should have a spare toslink input on your home theater gear. Connect the two, program that input on your home theater receiver to look for “PCM” audio; set it to play it back in two channel or a music surround mode if you prefer and prepare to be amazed. You can even connect the Apple TV’s video outputs to your home theater gear so you have complete control of your entire music collection in the palm of your hand. If this all seems daunting, hire a professional, but it’s really well worth it. You’ll also get a dual use out of your home theater to enjoy music on it. You are now at Level 2!

Level 3 is for the music lover who already has a pretty good audio playback system and wants to get the very best possible sound from their digitally stored music. This one is a bit trickier to pull off, but if you’ve got a great system, you will be rewarded. This will require putting either a Mac or PC into your audio system (the Mac sounds better by the way) and having a small computer monitor to view the method you choose to catalog your music. Ok, the key is getting a great new type of device that is called a USB DAC. This is a device that pulls the digital music directly off your hard drive via a usb cable, then decodes the music into two channel audio and passes it on to your stereo system. These devices can cost anywhere from 0 to about ,500 and are made by the cream of the crop of mostly small, specialty, American made (can you believe it!) companies. If you visit your local audio store, you see them from the likes of Signal Path, Ayre, Audio Research, Sumiko, Wavelength and more. The sound will astound you if your stereo system is up to the task. There is even some debate as to the methods used to rip your music to your computer. The Ayre website has some great information on these methods. A lot of us in the baby boomer generation loved music in our early years and have accumulated a ton of CD’s since they came out in the early 80′s. This is one heck of a great way to get all of these CD’s organized and sounding far better than even some of the most expensive CD players you can buy. There is nothing like sitting in front of your system with instant access to every single CD you have ever owned. This method is also a great way to playback the copyright free concerts you can legally download on line, and the new crop of very high resolution music that is starting to show up for online downloads.

Digitally stored music is the future of music as we know it. There are many paths you can go down to attempt to reproduce it in its original, live form. The first step is obviously just a good stereo system, but whatever method you decide on, enjoy the music, and be sure to have a good back up system in place for all of your music files and more.