Honestly what do you think of Chi-Pod & sound quality?
 

The title pretty much asks the question. Well . . . What do you think?

Re: Honestly what do you think of Chi-Pod & sound qualit
 

Depends on the manufacturer and board layout used.

My player sounds amazing. I've messed with all kinds of audio codecs on the PC side and have heard bad ones and good ones.

I got lucky in that my particular player seems to have quality analog output. Granted it's not the $5K DAC-ADC sitting in my basement (which sadly doesn't belong to me)....but it's better than most onboard sound solutions and better than I've heard from a lot of portable players.

if you're an audiophile then you'll be looking for a thousand reason why a chi-pod doesn't sound as good as a brand name player such as iPod. For me, as long as it is able to play my mp3s and media files, that's fine with me. also, getting good earphones such as Sennheiser can really make a difference in audio quality...if only i have spare change for one of those sennheiser :D

Sennheisers have come down a LOT in price the last few years. I have a pair of HD212Pro's (maybe, they may have gotten torn up by now) that are my "backup/reference" pair. I call them my reference pair because I've owned them for 6 years and my ears got REALLY used to thier flat response. I've not had them plugged in to my player because a year or so ago after getting sick of thier shoddy cables breaking, i rewired the things to have RCA plugs on the end...and I don't have my minijack to rca adapter anymore.

I own a pair of Bose Triports...the over-the-ear ones...they're nice headphones too...and when I came to my first conclusion about the quality of my chi-pod...it's what I based 'em off of (again, because I use them every day).

But, earlier I took and hooked my mp5's output in to my sound card and recorded a sample or two..aside from some filtering on the analog side, I could not see a huge difference in the output.

audiophiles are a fickle and weird bunch...and I would know becuase I'm just another banana amongst them. most of them wouldn't be caught dead with an iPod anyway because "digital audio is evil". I put a bunch of .flac audio samples up at Index of /player (forum automatically converts to link and changes to title, but there's no page) - one is the original (1000000.flac) and the one suffixed 2706 is off my player. My post titled "what player is this" has the details on how the process was done, but rest assured the audio was converted properly before and after the process to eliminate conversion variables, however, ultimately, the quality of that file will depend on the quality of your sound card, so to get a better idea...play it in a better sound system.

An overmistified theme
 

Sound quality have been frequently confused with equalization: deep bass, vibrant midrange, crystal clear treble, etc. are terms related with proper equalization.
Sound quality is the ability to reproduce original source without distortion, without spurious noise and at the proper level. Clicking, stuttering and other issues like that have to be also with sound quality.
Nowadays most of the player manufactured have such capabilities, it has to be a really poor manufacture or electrical failures what could make a player to sound really bad.
If everything goes fine the rest are the capabilities of the player to manipulate accordingly the original sound, and here comes additional chips (or software) that can handle sound in the right way to make pleasant the enjoyment of the player. You can have here the Digital Audio Coded (Wolfson for instance) or the software (PlayFX, SRS, BBE, etc.).
Here comes too the appropriate resources of the firmware as are all the sound managers frequently added in the software (firmware) being the Equalisator the most known.
It's important her to take in account the source: a good source will bring better sound if it's good. It won't sound the same and MP3 @ 64kbps than other @ 320kbps. Here are also the format it's not the same an MP3 (lossy) than a FLAC (lossless) format.


And finally... THE PHONES... the most critical part in what have to be with the enjoyment of the sound. All what is explained in previous paragraph worth nothing if the player doesn't have a good pair of phones.
Even the cheaper player can produce a delightful sound if it has a pair of good phones.
Even the most expensive player can sound like shit if no proper phones are used.

There is no such thing as good sound players... there are limited player, faulty one, bad firmware, badly manufactured, ugly designed, etc, etc, etc. but with actual technology any decent player can bring a decent sound.

The rest is merchandising, myth... or simply placebo.