[Closed] MP3 players for sound quality

Bitrate and sampling are most important. I RIP at 320Kb, and play music on an 8Gb Nano and an 80Gb iPod Video, both about five years old, and a 4G iPhone, with a variety of canalphones, Ultimate Ears SuperFi and TripleFi, and MEE Electronics M6 Sports, and by far and away the biggest difference I can hear is the mastering between different albums, and between different 'phones. If there's a difference between my three players, it's so subtle as to be unnoticeable. Certainly mastering makes the biggest difference by far. If you RIP at 128, then differences would be much less noticeable.
I'm not an audio engineer, but I'm very interested in audio generally and I'v read a lot about mastering and compression affects on audio quality.

I'm very impressed with my Sansa Clip+ with rockbox, 8G internal & 16G SD card. I'm using almost exclusively flac encoded files. Headphones are either Shure se420's or some decent Audio Technica cans.

Rockbox gives a noticeable improvement in sound output over the stock Sansa O/S. It's 100% stable. I've been using it for the last 18 months or so.

No iTunes compatibility AFAIK - i don't use it. It's USB storage compliant so appears as a couple of drives.

I downloaded a piece of software called itunes agent which keeps my 4gb MP3 player synched to the "My Top Rated" playlist in iTunes (as long as I prune the playlist to keep it under 4gb).

Sansa Clip+ sounds nice, but in-ear headphones are a must as it isn't very loud.
Hey, grahamb - does Rockbox let it go louder?

I'd suggest doing a search on headfi as they know their digital onions over there.
If you can be bothered I have found an ipod sounds lots better with a little headphone amp.

Sansa Clip+

I like the look of that, may see if I can pick up one cheap here. Volume level's not an issue as long as the quality's good and I use in-ears mostly.

headfi

Creative and Cowon/iAudio are known for having good sound quality. Sony isn't bad either, although the distinctive 'Sony sound' seems to be quite bassy.

iPods tend not to be great, generally, but I guess they're not made for audiophiles. But as above - bitrate and format will/ should have a bigger impact on sound quality.

Another vote for the Sansa Clip+ & Rockbox.
I´ve switched to almost all flac files (natively supported) since storage space is cheap.

I tried a few ipods and nanos, thought they were rubbish and itunes was too clunky for me, I prefer simple and fast.

I also tried an iriver mp3player a while back, really amazing sound but they´re a bit pricey.

Hey, grahamb - does Rockbox let it go louder?

Yes it does. It also doesn't have the region specific volume limit that the original has. Rockbox has a load of features that are way above what the original O/S provides. The manual is [url= http://download.rockbox.org/release/3.10/rockbox-sansaclipplus-3.10.pdf ]here[/url] if you want to check out what it'll do.

in-ear headphones are a must as it isn't very loud

The sound level is perfectly acceptable with my Audio Technica M50's & Rockbox.

I also have an old iRiver H340 that now has a 120G drive & 24 hour battery. The sound quality with that is leagues better than any of the small Clip/Nano sized players, but it's a brick & really not portable.

I have a creative BUT my HTC phone sounds much better I assume better DAC and headphone amp!
I did have an old iriver and that sounded very nice but was crap on the battery and the build quality was utter shite.

I always compare my iPhone to my old Walkmans and the like from many years ago. That soon stops me worrying about sound quality 🙂

As an aside, why is iTunes so love-hate? I've used it for years and but for one blip when an update rendered it unusable for a week or so, I find it "just works" (I'm also no Apple fan boi either).