Two days ago my 3rd gen iPod crapped out on me. Now you may ask why a 3rd gen iPod owner cares about sound quality, well I say that is because I bought it about 3 or 4 years ago.

So I have been scouring the Internet looking for tests on such players, and came across this interesting article here. Now obviously this is not the be-all and end-all of tests to be done, but as said in the article it is not the distortion or the frequency response that is an issue when plugged into a high impedance testing rig. But the problem arises with the driving power of many of these players.

very interesting was the results of the iPod shuffle, however I vaguely remember reading something about the iPod shuffle having superior sound quality but never thought twice about it.

Now looking on many message boards I repeatedly see these players being brought up.
-Kenwood HD30GB9
-Rio Karma
-iRiver
-Zune
But never is there any accompanying tests to prove this, it is purely based on perception.
Now if I did not care anything about features or customization of todays DAP's but *purely* sound quality, what would you say are todays worthy contenders, either based on the ability to speculate on pictures such as these, or with tests.
any links to such tests would be helpful or anybody willing to do such tests would be greatly appreciated.

I bring all of this up because of all the unfounded claims I see being made (not just here) when the point of message boards like this is to discuss based on fact. Now one could very well construct some sort of blind test, but I see this as being very hard to perform as the ability to listen to some small sample and repeatedly switch between 2 players and not knowing which player is which.

If you are plugging headphones in directly then that is the main problem. The ipod, some irivers, and probably quite a few others, have pretty good quality when used as line outs. You get lossless with rockbox support and the DACs are often OK. But as far as I know no player has a good internal headphone amp. And frequency response is an issue here, not only power.

I have a Zune.
I have a Kenwood HD30GB9 on order.

I plan to do a "blind" test with these two players with the assistance of my lovely and talented wife:
Que up the same song on both players, use the same headphones, and have my wife switch the headphones randomly between players and take notes for differences in quality, tone, volume, noise, etc.

I will do this with the following headphones:

Sennheiser PMX60
Shure E3C
Grado SR60

Any suggestions or requests are welcome.

Yeah its old and not as interesting as RMAA IMO. You want to dig up RMAA tests, ideally with loaded equipment. Heres a few:

http://www.duke.edu/~mgg6/rmaa/

(Note that the SNR figures on some of them are limited by my noisy onboard sound).

If you google enough, you can find some others too. However, theres so little actual testing out there its not worth stressing out over this. The best you're going to do is to pick a pair of >32 Ohm headphones and assume the load tests for your player and those phones will look like unloaded test results (which are very popular on Headfi and other forums). And if you do buy something interesting, post loaded RMAA results.




Essentially everything you will read on the internet about sound quality of DAPs is complete bullshit. No one is doing testing, most people don't even understand the difference between loaded and unloaded tests. Don't even pay attention to what people say.