Possibly Stupid IPOD question
 

My wife wants the IPOD. I love listening to my Onkyo stereo. I know there is an adapter to use the IPOD with a car stereo, but can you get one to use with your home stereo? Does this mean we will no longer have hundreds of CD's cluttering up the house?

Re: Possibly Stupid IPOD question
 

YES!

There is a stereo component that accepts the ipod interface. I can't remember the name.

Its on my wish list.

:)

You'll want a Mini-jack to RCA cable and the Ipod will work with your stereo.

You might want to consider ripping, (encoding) your songs at 192+ bps instead of the default 128, the songs should sound better on your stereo at that bit rate.

Re: Possibly Stupid IPOD question
 

You can get rid of your CDs, but you better develop a redundant data storage situation for them. I use two large firewire hard-drives that are mirrors, one backs up automatically to the other. If your Ipod fails or one of the hard-drives fails, you'll still have your tunes.

Of course, I own 2,000 CDs, so this might be less of a problem for you.

JCM

You might also want to look at the "Airport Express" product by Apple. Send music to your stereo from your computer (PC or Mac) via wireless LAN. Or simply plug your computer into the stereo, if they are close enough.

You can connect the iPod to the home stereo buy several ways.
1) a cable from the head phone jack to an auxiliary input on your stereo
2) an fm transmitter from belkin or simular (can use this in the car too)
or 3) a cassette adapter if you have a cassette player

option 1 will give the best sound.
another option is to have some good speakers connected to your PC. I have some Logitech z-680 speakers and they are really good.

There may be other options but they are all I can think about at the moment.

I use a mini stereo to RCA "Y" cable. It's what I use in my Boxster, too.

The headphone output jack on the iPod puts out an acceptable quality signal. My home system is Bedini/Marantz/Acoustat and the MP3 and Apple proprietary encoding is good enough for non-critical listening.

Thanks guys!

I would recommend ripping any cd's in the apples "waveloss" bitrate settings. If you only using the ipod in your car or as a walkmen, the default setting are adequate. You will definetly see a downgrade if you attempt to play this through a serious sound system or home theatre with the default bit rate. It really takes no longer to record in Waveloss and you can always take the sampling down to a smaller, but less dynamic, setting later. My line of thought is to record every cd that you may "borrow" in waveloss. Others dependant of their importance. You will quickly max out a 40gb ipod with waveloss though.

Possibly stupider question:
I have connected my ipod to the home theater receiver w/ a Y-cable from the ipod headphone jack. With this setup I am only getting use of the main L & R speakers. Playing a CD from the DVD player (connected w/ a digital coax cable) utilizes all 5 speakers. Is there any way to do this w/ the ipod?
thanks

Hi,
the issue will be in the setup of your AV receiver. What I think is going on is that your DVD channel is set (on the receiver) to output as 5.1 surround. The port that you are using for the iPod is set to output stereo.
Try going through the options in your receiver to find the menu for sound output. I had a simular issue with my unit when I first got it where my DVD player only outputted stereo.
You may have to use your remote to get to the correct menu (on some units).
Hope this helps

Thanks. So it should be possible to set up the receiver to get all speakers working with an ipod (or any other input device for that matter) that uses an old-school style red/white audio cable?

Correct, assuming that the reciver can do it.
My system pumps all speakers from DVD, video, TV, Foxtel (cable tv), x-box, cd-jukebox (301 disks) and the ipod (was the pc direct connect).
Good luck

I have an Ipod and use the headphone jack to an RCA Y cable for my stereo, and a cassette adapter for my car. It works well, and the sound quality is adequate.

HOWEVER: there are car stereos and in the future (or now) there will be home units where you can plug the iPod directly into the stereo unit via the data port instead of the headphone jack. That will result in better sound quality as well as song information can be displayed on the main stereo unit. Some cars (VW New Bettle, BMW's and Mercede's IIRC) already have such an adapter built in.

-Z.

I don't mean to ruffle any feathers, but it's begining to appear like the main interest of ipod users is the FORMAT and not the CONTENT of the actual music itself.

I'm not a fool, I do see its usefulness. There's a reason the walkman has grabbed a hold in the 80's and hasn't let go. The usefulness is when you're on the go. Taking a large chunk of your music library w/ you, even having it in the car, is very convenient. (I wouldn't bother sticking 100 cd's into my car either.) But, what's the point of listening to it at home? Isn't that what you bought the stereo and cd's for?

I don't know about you guys, but I can still tell the difference between an MP3 track vs. a real cd or lp that's playing through my system. In a car, on a plane, it doesn't matter, buy why would you want to reduce the musical quality of what you're hearing at home?

I really just don't have all my music in CD format. Besides ipods are great for parties / gatherings where otherwise you're stuck w/ buying some monstrous CD changer that isn't nearly as user friendly to sort & program.

I can see the usefulness in that, but I've also been to a party where there were several people lining up to hook up each of their ipods so that everyone could enjoy *their* playlists... it just looked silly. What's wrong w/ just burning your version of a party mix cd and handing it to the host?