the source file format I'm talking about (24b/96KHz .wav files) completely nuke the dynamic range available from old audio gear, and esp. vinyl. However, I'll agree with you that vinyl sounds better than anything you'll hear from ~99% of digital gear that's out there. There are a few reasons for this.

The first one is the natural compression that you get when you use something like vinyl, or even more so from old school 2" tape.

Part of this is because of how compression is achieved so as to make the storage requirements for portable players reasonable. MP3 is a lossy compression format, where the idea is to remove sound that most people won't notice so much. If you're looking for something better than that, I'd recommend getting a player that plays FLAC files, because flac is lossless. This means that at CD quality sound, an uncompressed wav file of a typical pop song will run you about 50 MB, a 128 kbs mp3 about five, and a flac about fifteen MB. This has ramifications for how much music you can store on a device. On the gripping hand, a typical pop song at the wav format I was using will run about 250 MB. So, if you're using something with eight gigs of storage, you can store 32 songs on it....

And there is another reason why this tech is awesome. It's because people like me can afford it. Audio quality is important, but not nearly as important as good music performed well... and having technology like this available for ~700$ is a thousand times better than the 2K$ 1/4" fostex reel to reel that I made my first recording on... and those are 1985 dollars, to boot. Far better quality for a fraction of the price, and since it goes into a computer the amount of tracking and overdubbing that I can do is limited only by the computer I plug it into. You can get a decent 16 track console for mixing for less than a thousand dollars now, whereas in the old days that kind of kit cost tens of thousands... and a 400 dollar computer nowadays can handle a tremendous amount, far in excess of that old fostex, which had but two ins.

btw- as an aside, the keys you hear there are being amplified through my Vox AC4: http://www.voxamps.c...ernclassic/ac4tv/ He has a Crate keyboard amp, but I think he's now considering getting a tube amp for his board... and this relates to why people like the old stuff. They like it because it's not super fidelious, which is good, esp. if the person playing knows how to use that lack of fidelity properly.

Edit: Huh, just cruised the Vox site and it looks like they're not making my AC15HTV anymore... which kind of sucks. They've got a new model that's probably pretty close, the AC15HW1X... but it's using the ECC83, not the EF86. Guess my amp's about to start appreciating now... (it's the 2007 50th Anniversary, serial number 518). Shit, I might have to go into hock again to get another one if there are still any in the distribution channel... those amps are just the BOMB.

The social implications of all this for music production are huge, and are a large part of why record companies are Going Away; their position depends on controlling both the means of production and the means of distribution, and digital technology is taking that control away from them from both ends.

Finally, the real issue with a playback device is that most of the devices out there have two big flaws; one is that the DAC runs at a low bitrate, and the other is that the amplifiers Suck Ass. What the bitrate the DAC can convert is an important spec for those devices... and the noise floor for the amp that runs the headphones is the other one.

Vinyl's coming back. At least up here it is... there are two record stores (as in honest to god records) in my wee little town here, and several outlets where you can buy turntables etc... some of it is used, some of it is "old-new", and some of it is just new. If you want compression but want it to be better, compress to 320Kbs cbr (er, constant bit rate) mp3 with the -q option at zero; you'll end up with bigger files but nowhere close to full audio, and they'll be pretty good... way better than FM radio, for example.

Besides, even with all that... the quality of the amp in the portable player, the dac in the portable player, and of course most of all of the headphones you're listening to have a much bigger effect on the quality of your listening experience.

Seriously Ash, it's a case of having a tradeoff... you can get something the size of your thumb and stuff hundreds or thousands of songs in it. That it's never any worse than an FM radio doesn't seem like a big drawback to me.