The DACs are pretty much the same as you could find in any other mp3 player. The cowon ones and so on were somewhat better, but not massively so. You can see a

The DACs are pretty much the same as you could find in any other mp3 player. The cowon ones and so on were somewhat better, but not massively so. You can see a battery of tests performed on various ipods as well as professional DACs costing thousands of $ here: http://www.daefeatures.co.uk/rmaa.php http://www.daefeatures.co.uk/rmaa.php They don't kick out a lot of power, so they don't cope well with fancy headphones. The bad reputation of the ipod's sound stems largely from those white earbuds that came in the box, which are genuinely abominable. That and confirmation bias/placebo/etc.