Trace Bundy - "Adapt"     Amazing acoustic guitar work...  

Jeff Beck - Emotion & Commotion  

There are tons of threads out there with more specific recommendations if you want it, but the bottom line is that the QC15s are a good choice IF you are looking for active noise cancellation.  If that's not a feature you care about, there are certainly headphones with better sound quality for...

    Adapt - Trace Bundy

"The Ragpicker's Dream" - Mark Knopfler    

"A Hundred Miles or More:  A Collection" - Alison Krauss    

  Looks great!  Gonna give it a shot this weekend.

  I'm sure others feel differently, but for me going from MP3 to FLAC is definitely worth it, going from FLAC to WAV is most definitely not.  As always, YMMV.

  Afraid I can't help you with the full scope of your questions, but I can tell you that I have used a FiiO E17 with no problem from a Motorola Droid RAZR M running a recent CM 10.2 nightly, so it's likely not an issue with CM.  Not positive about 10.1.2, but I don't think that one does...

  Actually, they're not.  AIFF and WAV are uncompressed.  FLAC and ALAC are also lossless, but are compressed.

Yes - "Fragile"     Los Lonely Boys - "Los Lonely Boys"   King Crimson - "In the Court of the Crimson King"  

  Apple lossless (ALAC) and FLAC are both compressed lossless formats, so there is no need to convert to FLAC unless you change to a player that doesn't support ALAC.  

  Yup!  It's been a long time since I pulled that one out...  

 

The Loki is DSD only - you'd need to look at the Bifrost if you wanted to upgrade the DAC within the Schiit line.     As for the rest of your questions, hopefully someone with a lot more knowledge chimes in, but how much the vocals will improve, relatively speaking, by upgrading from the...

"In My Tribe" - 10,000 Maniacs  

  I'm like you and prefer new, and normally buy from Amazon, but I've also picked up a couple of used items here from other Head-Fiers on the for sale/trade forum and the experiences have been really good.  Also in the middle of buying a couple of things directly from the manufacturer (Schiit)...

Absolutely can tell a difference!  I get a much cleaner sound now and the separation seems improved, and best of all, all of the noise that normally comes through from the phone is history.   The IEMs and cans that I normally use with the phone (Shure SE215 and Grado SR80i) are pretty easy to...

  Wow!  Loaded up a port of Slim Bean 4.3 build 1 for the Motorola Droid RAZR M, and I'm now listening to a FiiO E17 working directly from from the phone with a USB OTG cable - thanks CZ Eddie for letting us know!

What kind of setup do you have on the laptop, and any chance you have the volume turned down below 100% for the digital interface output?  

Hopefully someone here can help you, but if you don't get an answer you may want to try asking on the Portable Source Gear forum as well.

  Sorry, incorrectly assumed you meant the 3rd gen iPod Touch.  The 20gb part should have been a dead giveaway...