Quote: Originally Posted by
halfzack 
and even with a low voltage, the wire is so big out of the digital out (not the normal headphone jack, i am talking about the port out of the bottom of the ipod.) it would carry most electronic signals without much distortion at all. i am sure from reading else were in this forum, you still have to wire your pc to your deck in some way to get sound out of it. so whether you use an ipod or a pc the level of signal alteration is about the same.
Not at all true. The actual rail to rail voltage of the audio processing chips in an ipod, is so small, that the normal human hearing spectrum is cut almost in half. So I am not talking about all frequencies, just from 20hz-20khz. They only go from around 100Hz to 10khz before the bandgap starts to degrade and there is noticeable distortion.
Also the first few generations were bad, and the newest ones are worse with the best being around 5th gen for input response settliing. Send in a very small "blip" to the audio circuit, you should get a very small blip but bigger out ideally, and realistically you should get a sinusoidal hump that is very close to flat everywhere but the blip and then a sharp rise and a quick fall. Yeah that doesnt exist in the ipods. They take forever to settle, bouncing all around. And that is 1 blip. Now put in music which is millions of different blips and all you want is for it to become larger to play through speakers/headphones, but instead it is made larger, and there is random interferance adding or taking away parts of the wave that gets worse.
And sorry to burst your bubble, but the headphone jack and the lineout jack are powered by the same circuit! Only difference is the output impedance they shove in there to drive different devices, and the output from both ports are pretty much equal.
Now you dont have to wire a PC to a deck, you can go straight to a real amp. But the quality of sound is much much much much better even with onboard crappy chips like the AC'97. Reason? They have more headroom. Take a 5v supply, and you can swing your little audio signal anywhere you want without reason and no worries about wasting power because it is either plugged in, or in a device where the battery will last a long long time and is replaceable when it fails. Now put a device like the x-fi in the PC, and it is even better by a mile.
So to sum up... ipod = crappy output nomatter the port
Linear Mode
