[Tardisk]

I'm not quite sure which forum this belongs in, but this seemed like an ok start.
 
About four three years ago, I got myself a pair of HFI-580s, and I've loved them ever since. I listen to at least three hours of music a day, and making music is a very big part of my life. I've been powering my headphones from my Windows Phone, which has a Dolby audio chip, for whatever that's worth.
 
Recently, I swear I've been able to hear distortion in my music, particularly on snare and cymbal hits. I can hear the weird echo-y shimmer of an overly compressed mp3. The thing is, I'm all my music files are of relatively high quality. Flac is inconvenient for me, so I keep all my files as wavs which presumably get converted to mp3 when I copy them to my phone. I want to know where to go from here. What is my best option for a high quality very portable music rig? I have an iPod, so would it be worth it to get a dac that can read the raw files off the player? Should I get a player that can play wavs? Should I just ditch portable and get used to listening through a dac connected to my computer? Or are my audio files really the problem? Thanks for reading! I can't tell you how much I love this forum.

 

[PredatorZ]

Itunes will convert wave to apple lossless, also foobar can convert most files to wave, move them to itunes and turn to a lossless smaller file. I re-ripped my entire library to lossless, the files are bigger and Identical to the CD. MP3's are terrible quality, and you are hearing that. No need for a DAC just to convert them, but you will see a huge increase in sound quality with a DAC/amp.
 

 

[xnor]

Convert your rips to FLAC or ALAC. Check that the distortion you heard is not on the recording which is often the case for dynamically compressed tracks.
 
For your portable rig, use AAC, Ogg Vorbis or higher bitrate MP3.