[buffoonhead]

I've been lurking on this site a while without contributing, and now I'm asking questions so apologies...
 
I've been using a small ipod touch and a National headphone amplifier and B+W P5 phones...
 
My ipod is broken and I'm looking to upgrade... and I've had a very very rare work bonus so it makes sense to upgrade my player.
 
The downside is that all my music is on my Apple laptop in itunes but I really fancy a decent player as I use it so much.  I was thinking of the colourfly C4 or the ibasso DX100... but is this feasible with my Apple laptop.
 
I guess my number one priority is sound quality... the rest can follow, and I only want a music player.
 
I've a one off chance to make a decent purchase, but I'm a bit lost I have to say... any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks
 
Pete

 

[Sefelt103]

Hi buffoonhead and welcome to the forum. If your music collection was purchased on iTunes then you would have a problem upgrading to the stellar heights of Colorfly's C4 or the DX100. These players need a lossless source or WAVs to make them shine. If you have a cd collection then you could re-rip to Flac/WAV. From what I have read of the B&W P5s these  are trendy closed back headphones with Apple facilities suitable for travel. To get the most  from the C4/DX100 hi-fi full size headphones from Beyerdynamic/Sennheiser/Grado are required or if you wish to use these players outside various IEMs could serve you like Shure SE535s. However these sort of players are often not optimised for IEMs/earbuds and complexities like the low impedance of IEMs can detract from the listening experience. There are also a few other disadvantages (besides cost) with these sort of players. User interfaces are frequently inferior to Apple's system, due to the high grade electronics this saps the battery limiting even a heavy duty battery to under 10 hours continuous playback. Storage space tends to be limited which is unfortunate when dealing with WAV files. It should be worth it for the neutral (hopefully) sound signature.

 

[buffoonhead]

Thank you for those comments, much appreciated.
 
Most of my music is from cds, just stored in itunes... so it seems I might need to re-copy the cds in a better format?  I can do that!
 
And maybe better headphones...
 
I can live with the battery and the limited capacity - guess I'll just need to rotate... blimey, it's a complex world!!