[s-cars] Speaking of Ipods NAC (long)

[Dave Ellis]

Sounds like a nice system in your S-car!  I should have mentioned that 
the small capacity iPods use a flash memory card for storage, so no 
skipping at all, ever.  The larger capacity iPods use a hard drive, 
which may also "skip" in some situations, though you you have to knock 
them a hell of a lot harder than a CD player to cause it to skip.  Like 
most car and portable CD players, the hard drive based iPods use a 
memory buffer to prevent the chances of a skip affecting playback. 
Unlike portable CD players which offer 5,10, or even 30 second memory 
buffers to prevent skipping though, the latest iPods use a 20 *minute* 
memory buffer.  So unless you're driving on a gravel potholed road at 
rally speeds for an extended period, you shouldn't ever have a problem 
with skipping again.

The test my wife and I used to choose a bitrate to compress our music 
collection at was to load a few pieces of music onto the iPod at 128, 
192, 224, and 320 kbps, and also the same pieces in uncompressed WAV 
format from the original CD.  We then listened to the music on both the 
headphones and on our home system playing back the various versions of 
the same music over and over to eventually determine what bitrate gave 
us an acceptable sound quality.  The same process would probably be of 
benefit to you in deciding at what point you reach the point of 
diminishing returns audio-wise, since by the sound of it you're car's 
audio system is probably better than most.

-Dave



Djdawson2 at aol.com wrote:
> Dave,
> Thanks for all the great info.  Sound quality is very important to me, 
> as I spend a great deal of time driving... about 30k miles this past 
> year in the UrS alone.  I did spend about $2k on the stereo equipment in 
> my UrS, plenty of that budget on a Nakamichi MB100 that is a DIN sized 6 
> disc changer.  The sound quality is excellent, but listening to a 
> skipping CD on a fun twisty road due to stiff suspension components is a 
> flat out drag.
>  
> Having just bought a new Ipod for one of the kids... and helping her 
> load it with her music... I just started to wonder how tough it would be 
> to mate up the Ipod with a good car stereo.  The info out there seems to 
> be lacking in detail.  So I appreciate the advice.
> Thanks,
> Dave