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Audiophiles are always the first to complain about the lack of music integrity instilled with the less then CD-quality sounds that the iPod allows. We don’t really care whether our headphone wires are gold plated or not for better conductivity, but something like the iLink seems like a good idea if your willing to shell out the money. MSB promises that with their iLink docking station, the music on your iPod can be listened to at Bit-perfect CD quality levels. The iLink provides the first pure digital audio output allowed through an iPod by actually modifying the iPod itself to allow the transfer of digital data.
So, the question remains the same. Do you want to pay a normal amount of money and hear some good music or do you want to pay almost $2000 so you can hear every slide and scratch of a track. If it matters that much to you whether you can hear every aspect and minutiae of the music, then the iLink can provide you the power of audiophile sound from your iPod. And oh yeah, it looks pretty ugly. — Andrew Dobrow
Presuming you’ve stored the music in a lossless format in the first place?
If you’ve saved it in the iPod as MP3/AAC/whatever, it’s digitally compressed with a lossy algorithm, and all the fancy tricks in the world won’t bring it back up to “bit perfect CD quality”. Crappy speakers/headphones are probably a blessing.
I love my (non apple) mp3 player, and the ability to play AACs on my phone, but I won’t kid myself or anyone else by claiming it’s CD quality – the high rate VBR files I make in LAME nowadays come pretty close, but a 128k one from iTunes (which I have a few of, as it was the only source for some stuff) sure as hell doesn’t.