ipod decible and audio quality

I tend to notice that when I play my ipod vs someone elses mp3 player, the ipod quality isnt very full. most of my songs are at a 160, 192, and 128. Most of it varies. My theory is that there is too much decibles being pushed through the headphones or stereo that the ipod is plugged into. It all depends on the quality of a sound system, but what I have noticed especially with my car, it tends to fade in and out constantly when played through the radio tansmitter on a higher volume. I have tried other people's audio player, and that issue doesn't exist. The ipod i have is the latest classic 80gb. I was wondering if there is any way to tweek this issue. Would it have anything to do with the computer I sync the music on with?

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Originally Posted by killabuzzerd

I tend to notice that when I play my ipod vs someone elses mp3 player, the ipod quality isnt very full. most of my songs are at a 160, 192, and .

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First of all, there are three separate issues going on here:

1. Quality of source. Lossy compressed MP3s will always suffer in comparison to the original WAV source.
2. Quality of earbud/headphone. The Apple supplied earbuds are not that good. I use aftermarket Shure E3Cs.
3. Quality of car interface. Using an FM converter always involves compromises. I must use one for an XM Radio in one of my cars. It is frequently noisy.

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Originally Posted by killabuzzerd

My theory is that there is too much decibles being pushed through the headphones or stereo that the ipod is plugged into.

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Don't think so. I get very good results with my iPod using uncompressed recordings through the Shures.

rw

Is mp3 always compressed or can I use it as uncompressed? I dont know much about these things

also doesn't wma tend to be higher in quality than mp3 if at the appropriate bit rate?

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Originally Posted by killabuzzerd

Is mp3 always compressed or can I use it as uncompressed? I dont know much about these things

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The MPEG-1 Layer 3 standard, aka MP3, is inherently a compression scheme. Read this. On other other hand, LAME encoded MP3s sampled at 320k sound pretty darn close to Redbook CD. While you have little choice for downloads (most are low-rez), you can rip your own CDs using EAC (Exact Audio Copy) using LAME encoding, both of which are free for downloading.

rw

What is a good, safe, and free program I can use to open a TAR file? LAME is in TAR form.

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Originally Posted by killabuzzerd

What is a good, safe, and free program I can use to open a TAR file? LAME is in TAR form.

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I believe WinRAR works.

rw

ok I got LAME. How would i utilize it. I'm trying to find the exe file or whatever I do to use the encoder.

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Originally Posted by killabuzzerd

ok I got LAME. How would i utilize it. I'm trying to find the exe file or whatever I do to use the encoder.

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Google is your friend. I believe I used the first reference from H2 Audio to configure mine.

Setting up LAME in EAC

BTW, if you should ever want to use FLAC instead (lossless codec), you would configure it in the same place, i.e. you could only use one or the other.

rw

when you rip a toon set it at a variable bitrate, that way it will only compress the bits that don't matter and you end up with a good sound and a small file.

It has in a way improved things. I have just recently run into a page that might be interesting. I don't know if it's true, so here are the links. The links say that the 6G sounds way worse than the 5G and that the sound in it is seriously flawed. this does make sense, cuz I compared my 6G w/ my friends 5G and his sound way better. also it might be cuz of the headphones I use, but the 5G would sound better no matter what kinds of headphones I would use to compare right? anyway here are the links:

http://www.ask.com/bar?q=ipod+audio+....com%2Fipod%2F

http://www.ask.com/bar?q=ipod+audio+....com%2Fipod%2F

heres another one I forgot

http://homepage.mac.com/marc.heijlig...omparison.html