Electronics : Apple iPod classic 80GB black

Rating: - Poor sound quality, dismal volume. Very disappointed.
This is the first iPod I've owned and I have to say that I wish I'd saved my money and stayed with my old CD walkman which plays MP3s.

Briefly:

Pros:
- it's the only MP3 player of this capacity on the market.

Cons:
- the sound quality is awful. Apple used a new sound processing chip for this iPod and it's just not very good - the sound lacks detail and depth. Usually one could try dialling this out with...

- the equaliser, but this is also useless because if your songs are properly "normalised", any attempt to boost the sound results in clipping and distortion. Also, all the EQ curves are preset - i.e. you can't create a custom EQ curve.

- the EU volume limit. I appreciate that there is little Apple can do about EU laws, but from reading the forums, the volume limit is set lower on the Classic than on other current iPods. And it really is ridiculously low, especially for classical music which may have quiet passages that you would like to hear above the train noise. There is no known hack for this limit at the moment and it doesn't seem likely that there will be.

- iTunes. Well I use MediaMonkey for syncing to the iPod and it works well. Enough said about iTunes, I think.

In conclusion, yes, the iPod Classic is a stylish package with a nice display and good usability, but it's not the first time that Apple have
- put Form before Function,
- produced a product with great potential but which was ultimately flawed, and subsequently
- lost huge market share.

That's why I switched from Mac to Windows in 1999, and that's also why my next MP3 player will not be from Apple.

---

Rating: - Ipods are great when they work without any hick ups
I am on my second ipod, and yes they sound great if you use a high bit rate or lossless quality setting, however the more music i put on my ipod the more likely it is to crash, My ipod has crashed and i have had to put on all 8000 songs again, and that is very time consuming! Also the headphones that come with the ipod are terrible, they are very tinny lack any clarity especially in the bass frequencies. I think apple should pair up with another company such as shure to produce their headphones, which would compliment the great sound you can get from this little machine.
I would strongly recommend any apple products, i have a macbook pro and an imac and they are great! the ipod is in my opinion the best music player on the market at its price range, the only thing that beats it is the bang and olufsen mp3 player for sound quality, but for a whole package the ipod wins, it is easy to use hs lots of features, you can store loads of music and it sounds great, but if you are using it with headphones and you love music invest in some good headphones, sony's MDR EX90LP are a great pair of single drive headphones for the price you can get them for around £40, but if you are feeling extravagant and have the money get some shure headphone the SE530s are great as are the e5c's but they cost more than the ipod, but truly bring your music clarity to life. Hope this helps

---

Rating: - Amazing device ...but... this painful iTunes
I really like this device. It is a great thing to have for your music (as the sound quality is very good), your video (to watch movies while travelling, and a quality is good), and for your photos. Care should be taked with photos. I would only recommend to make your photos below 500kb each before uploading them, otherwise iPod is quite slow dealing with them.
The real problem I have is related to iTunes. It is a big pain to use this program. It clearly needs to be improved.

---

Rating: - could'nt be easyer to use
this could'nt be easyer to use , pluged it in transfered 4500 songs in about 15 minits , all you need is to use i tunes .

---

Rating: - Problems With Volume Level
To everyone having problems with the volume limit.

Go to Settings then volume limit. Increase it there and this will sort your problems out.