Reading many threads here and this one now I think I must be the stupidest, terrible hearing quality person on Earth!
For years I avoided Apple because I read reviews on forums about the poor sound quality, being "chained" to decrepit Itunes and so on.
I used Sony mainly though had a brief flirtation with Cowon D3, I liked the Sony, did not like the way I had to use it to store tunes on my computer though! The cowon I was really looking forward to but found it to be poorly made and did not sound good until I used EQ.
I put up with it all though as I believed all the good folks on the forums, that Ipod was cack, souded terrible, that Steve Jobs was the second coming of Satan, That Itunes sucked as it was hard to use..
Then a friend asked why I had such a disdaine for Ipods, I told them and they asked if I actually had listened to one! They got theirs out(and 80gig ipod), I plugged in my Etymotics and I was lost in the music. It sounded great, better than what I had been listening to. I asked what eq he was using and non was the reply, just lossless. I was sold!
I got my first Apple product, the Itouch second Gen, loaded Itunes, used the easy feature to convert my files to lossless and was away!
It remains the only Apple product I use, I just cannot get used to Mac computers, I now use the latest 160g ipod, no eq but amped and through a LOD with IE8's, my set up goes right against the grain of what a large amount of folks here think sound great. Me, I do not care really, my foot taps to the beat, I get lost in the music, no fiddling around with EQ, simple way to download, no mucking about tweaking (I am not in the least a techie guy and what a large amount of you do to get the ultimate sound is way beyond me!) and off I go!
I notice especially with the Cowon products most folks only find it sounds great if EQ is applied (from the reviews I have read!) to me this makes the player fundementaly flawed. Surely the player should sound it's best with no EQ, if not then to me it can't be a great player!
Just my thoughts, I am not trying to say my set up is the bees nees, just that to these 46 year old ears it always amazes me what can come out of a tiny set of phones and small box with a hard drive!