Best process to make near audiophile portable system needed

[timbo]

Ive got some new and old cds, some old cassetes and a few albums. Just bought my first mp3 player (5G Creative Labs). Im pretty much a rookie at all of this PC/MP3 audio recording/mixing stuff.. Here is my quandry.. I want to end up with my mp3 player holding all of my music (old and new) sounding as audiophile as possible without spending an arm and a leg. Someone please inform me If my thinking is on par.. I think I know (not sure about any of this) I need a decent headphone amp, some decent cans/earbuds and a soundcard that has an eq? Can I save my cd's/tapes/albums to my PC, mix them to my likeing with a sound card and then save them again to my PC, then transfer to my mp3 in a my chosen mixed version??
What type of file should I save them as? Any different/helpful/confirming thoughts, tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

[spago]

The best set-up would be a 4G non-Photo iPod or a 2G iPod Mini (the Zen Micro whic I presume is your player was a bit of a mistake as far as feeding amps go, unfortunately), a Pocketdock or Sik Din cable, a decent amp (Meier-audio porta corda, Ray Samuels SR-71, Xin SuperMacro, etc) and a decent pair of headphones.


Recording your own tapes and LP's is best done with a decent soundcard supporting 96K / 24-bit recording (best to capture the nuances of analog sound), after which you can downsample to a portable-friendly format. The E-Mu 0404 (http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20041104/) is a very good way to get into low-cost, high-quality recording. It's harder to get a better recording quality bang-for-the-buck.


I like Cool Edit Pro becuase I've used it for ages, but Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) is a very capable free option.


As for me, I use a variety of players and I stick to LAME-encoded 256K MP3 for the portability and 'good enough' sound. I use the Qualia 010 (http://www.audiocubes.com/category/Headphones_Audiophile/product/Sony_Qualia_Q010-MDR1_Stereo_Headphones.html) headphones without an amp.

[DaHaq]

Apparenly iPod shuffle and iPod nano have had their audio output improved from the original design, especially in the area of bass quality.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1778968,00.asp

Unfortunately, the Shuffle only holds 1 gig and the nano 4 gigs, compared with regular iPod's 60 gigs.

[bacchanal]

A couple other good and relatively inexpensive audio interface cards are M-Audio 2496 and Audiophile192. I tend to agree with spago on the software and encoding. 256kb is about right for mp3. You will probably want to save your original WAVs that you record as well. Put them on a CD!

[DaHaq]

Hocc, i'm fairly sure you're joking (if so, good one), but I don't suppose any headphone would be out of the question for a portable, as long as you have a proper headphone amp. I personally just use the Grado SR-80s with my ipod, no extra amp, and it sounds just as good as my home receiver.