How to Make an iPod More Hi-Fi

I've discovered that many folks are under the misconception that iPods have some mysterious way of making music sound horrible. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

I'll provide some insight into this and show you how to make listening on your iPod much more pleasurable.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• iPod
• Headphone or earbuds
• Computer with iTunes application

1. The first thing to understand is that what most associate with "horrible sound" and its relation to the iPod is the quality of the mp3. It is not the player that is at fault, but the lousy compression inherent in an mp3 formatted song file.
   
   
   
   When you import your CD into iTunes it will be converted from the original audio file to an AAC format by default. AAC is Apple's proprietary file format for audio conversion. It is similar to the mp3, only with a bit more fidelity.
2. A very simple understanding of how the mp3/AAC formats affect the fidelity of the music is this: It takes the original audio file from the CD and compresses it into a smaller size. Obviously when you minimize the size of this data to one tenth of it's original size, it is clear that much of the sonic information is forfeited. Kind of like trying to cram a marshmallow into a beer bottle.
   
   
   
   It is more of a marketing strategy to profess that you can get 10,000 songs on your iPod. Though true, you will be compromising the full sonic quality of the music in favor of more songs. Quality or quantity?
3. So in order to get the full CD quality, open the iTunes application and choose "Preferences" from the file menu.
4. Choose "Advanced" and "Importing."
5. Select WAV as the audio format for import of the CD data.
6. Import the CD into your iPod and you are ready to rock. Now you can enjoy the full fidelity of the CD as it was originally intended.