[166848]

been listening to my grado 325is with a little dot 1+ hooked up to my ipod 160 gb with apple lossless and thought i would try it with a cheap old sony cd/dvd player i had in the other room. hooked up some old cheap rca cables from the little dot to the cd player put a cd in, the headphones on and man i can actually hear the difference. 
 
 ok after all of that....... i guess to my question. i thought lossless would be just like listening from a cd. what gives. makes me want to buy a nice cd player and hook it up to my little dot and only use my ipod when im out.
 
 ok i guess my question is............. is lossless NOT cd quality?

 

[estreeter]

Quote:

 ok i guess my question is............. is lossless NOT cd quality?

 
Wouldnt a better question be 'why is the DAC in my CDP better than the $5 DAC in my iPod ?'. This has less to do with the quality of the signal than the quality of the way in which the signal is being converted to analog - your amp can only work with the analog signal its being fed. I will offer this - my amp is significantly 'gruntier' at a given volume setting from my MSII USB DAC than it is from my iPod Nano's headphone out - go figure
 

 

[Elanzer]

The difference has nothing to do with the actual CD vs Lossless source, and everything to do with the digital to analog conversion process in your ipod versus the CD player. The DAC in the CD player is likely much superior to the one in your ipod, which isn't exactly known to be a good performer in this category.

 

[166848]

i even have my ipod hooked up to the little dot with one of those LOD to RCA cables thinking i would here a BIG difference over the cable that plugs into the headphone jack of the ipod. i didnt. but man i really was surprised with the difference of the cd player compared to the ipod. i guess that shows what i know about this stuff

 

[Elanzer]

Unless you have an ipod dock that bypasses the internal DAC of the ipod with better output, it'll always be sort of lackluster. The amp is just amplifying what it's given.

 

[Happy Camper]

portability vs performance
 
Apple needs to pin out the I2S feed from the reader but that would be too much to ask.