Hooking up an I Pod to a receiver

[boomac]

My kid wants to hook her I Pod up to a receiver so she can listen to her favorite music through a pair of Heresy speakers that I gave her. Is there one cord that will handle this or does she need some kind of kit?

[dbflash]

Boomac,

I just bought an iPod last week myself.

I just found these at Radio Shack.

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2117891&cp

I am going to see if my local Radio Shack has them in stock in the next day or so.

Danny

[BEC]

There are lots of less expensive ones.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ipod/accessories/

http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/ipod_cable_kit/

Bob

[Jay481985]

I worked at the apple store and that monstaer cable is very shoddy in

manufacture. The nylon braiding wears very fast and the pins tend to

separate from the plastic. Any radioshack 1/8 mini stereoplug to audio

rca cables will be fine they go for around 6 dollars. 1/8 = 3.5 mm

ministereo plug.

[boomac]

Many thanks!

[dbflash]

yea, thanks for the links and the mini "reviews".

danny

[dbflash]

went to radio shack on the way home and saw the monster cable. to me for $30 it was not worth it.

thanks to Bob for the link i am going to order 3 (main & bedroom systems and car) kits from griffin. $45 plus shipping.

thanks again

danny

[ltsdnce]

Walmart sells one for about $5 that works great and sounds better than the monster cable version.

[djn]

Hi Danny, I would really like to hear your impressions after listening to the ipod through good speakers. Cheers.

[klipschaholik]

I won an ipod nano at a conference a few months back and hooked it up to an extra set of heresy speakers via a sonic T amp; the little 15 watt amp at everyone was chattering about a while back. Sounded pretty good coming from such a small package. The amp came with a mini jack split to a RCA stereo out connector cord. Big Sound from a small package!

[colterphoto1]

ugh, nasty MP3 songs ripping forth from Heresies. Something just not right about that. Talk about shoddy source material, but I suppose it's okay. I use my iMac for a jukebox but keep the MP3 set at 192 for higher quality.

M

[pauln]

I gave my Carver M500t (250w/ch) to my neice. She plays her Ipod into it just fine. (likes to dance)

[boomac]

I hear you Michael. We just set them up with my old Tandberg receiver, (quite good with Klipsch) and she has been listening to FM. I think she is actually starting to appreciate quality sound and we'll see what happens when she sets up the I Pod. I bet she trys to hit me up for a CD player but she's only here for another month and a half then off to school in Spain.

[sivadselim]

Walmart sells one for about $5 that works great and sounds better than the monster cable version.

I'm sure it works great, but "sounds better"???? [:^)]

[thebes]

Ipods and the whole mp3 thing are very much like the (but much more

expensive) cheap Japanese transitor radios of my youth. Crummy

sound but if you are young, and grooving on the music, sound quality is

really not that important. All that will come later.

For the adults that dig mp3 though, a curse on all of you for your tin

ears. It's like drinking Ripple when you can afford better.

[JBryan]

My wife loves her iPod and Apple rolls out a new model often enough to make her gift-giving a breeze. We A/B'd the iPod with a CDP in my system tried through all the encoding formats but the tunes still came across as "near-CD" quality - a bit more compressed with roll-off at the extremes.

Having said that, we have a wireless setup using the Apple Airport and can run iTunes through the system using an Express module. I gotta say that the convenience of playing thousands of tunes at the touch of a button is hard to beat and I now tend to record a new CD into the computer before I play it in my system.

The iPod is a great way to carry your CD library around with you but iTunes is more versatile - you can drag & drop songs, albums and artists and EQ as you go from any room in the house.

The iPod and iTunes won't supplant my CDP or turntable for critical listening but they are an incredibly convenient and fun way to play music around the house.

Have fun, Bryan

[dbflash]

exactly what Bryan said.

it will never replace my cdp, but i can hit play and go for hours with what i want to hear not what clear channel wants me to hear.

i will also only put music from the couple thousand cd's i own on it. this way i can catch up on all the cd's that i have bought listened to once and never played them again.

danny

[baseballfan]

For the adults that dig mp3 though, a curse on all of you for your tin

ears. It's like drinking Ripple when you can afford better.

I agree that for "on the go" with typical headphones MP3 quality can be

passable (I always used the "Extreme" setting in Exact Audio Copy using

the Lame encoder which created variable bit rates in the 225k+ range

and pretty good sound even with my Sennheisers).

Having said that though, there are viable alternatives to MP3. My

portable player is a 20gb Rio Karma, which supports FLAC format files

(Free Lossless Audio Codec). FLAC will compress audio files to

about 60% of the full sized WAVE file, so certainly not as small as

MP3, but the resulting files are true CD quality, not "near CD", and I

can get about 50 CDs worth on the Karma at a time. It also came with a

dock that includes RCA connections to hook it up to a receiver.

It isn't as "slick" looking as an iPod, but the FLAC support was a real selling

point for me.

I also run a mini-plug to RCA connector from my PC's sound card to my

receiver so I can use my office PC as a jukebox for the family room

system which is in the next room (WinAmp has a FLAC plug in).

I've got the majority of my CDs ripped to FLAC, and I'm slowly getting

my concert CDR collection on there as well on a "as I want to listen to

a show" basis. At some point that 250gb hard drive is going to

run out of room though....I noticed yesterday that Costco is carrying a

400gb drive ;-)

[JBryan]

Good point BBFan...

I'm certainly not up on all the latest/greatest encoding formats and they keep coming up with new ones to improve on the "near CD" tag these players have been given. Formats aside, my wife and I compared most of the formats available through iTunes - including bit-for-bit which should be an exact copy of the original CD but the iPod still didn't approach the sound we heard using the CDP.

All I'm saying is that iPods and the like do exactly what they're designed to do. They hold an incredible amount of music in a pocket-size box. I don't think they have the sound quality of a nice CDP but that's not their purpose. I'm sure its just a matter of time before someone comes up with one that does compete with the better CDPs but by then maybe CDs will be obsolete.

Have fun, Bryan

[JBryan]

BTW, I just checked and our iTunes has over 9700 songs on over 1000 albums from over 600 artists. All this and my wife's iPod (60gigs) still has plenty of space left over. She now downloads a handful of Podcasts each day and plays them at work along with the music. I like the iPod's video feature which lets me download the album art and displays it with the track. You can now download music videos and even TV shows but I can't imagine enjoying that on a 3" screen.

The only drawback I've noticed is that she doesn't get into the more esoteric jazz and progressive music I tend to listen to. I often find that this kind of music has been mysteriously "unchecked" so it never comes up when we listen to the Shuffle feature which is what we do on weekends and while doing chores. And she's quick too. I recorded the James Chance and the Contortions box set "Irresistible Impulse" just last night and I just found it - unchecked. I wonder if she even bothered to give it a cursory listen...

We'll have to talk about this... Have fun, Bryan