Listened to an Ipod for the 1st time, yeah 1st time ever, haha, funny. Call me crazy, but does the sound quality sound a bit "electronic" or fake? Ive always known satellite music to sound terrible, kind of echo-like, but never imagined that Ipod (digital mp3 versions of CD's, not itunes) would sound like this. Im no audio snob by any means, but am I alone in this thought?

iRivers have a little more effort put into keeping the sound quality from being completely crap.
Some iPods sound better than others - this is usually down to how much compression was used when the CDs were burnt onto the PC in the first place. Other factors responsible for sound quality degradation include poor headphone stage, DAC quality and possibly headphone quality. I say possibly because if the tunes are heavily compressed it'll result in better headphones reveaing just how much information is missing and what it's done to the sound.

Portable MP3 players are much more about convenience than sound quality. My Sony WMDD-33 Direct Drive cassette Walkman sounds leagues better than my iPod (224kbps, VBR, Quality; highest) but it's big and bulky in comparison.

I had no idea they could be this popular and sound so bad, even to my uneducated ears. Guess there arent too many discerning listeners left. Ill happily stick w/ the good old fashioned CD's and be called grandpa. I just cant bring myself to listen to music that sounds like that. Its not such a big deal to swap cd's out of the changer every week or 2.

I've still never listened to an Ipod, ... and not likely to.

But overall, yeah, iPod sound quality is not as good as some other vendors out there. My iAudio X5 is much better and has a more powerful amp which does not distort bass as easily as my iPod does.

To get the best SQ from an ipod, use the Apple Lossless Compression to convert your CD's and use the dock for your output whenever possible. If using the headphone out, get some quality headphones.

if you use lossless and a high end, external D to A converter. Otherwise, yes, they sound quite nasty and with an FM tuner on a car stereo, absolutely horrible.

isnt there.

the problem with FLAC and lossless compression is the files are HUGE and one album will take up what a comparable 320kbps mp3 would be abel to fit 3 albums in place of thet one FLAC album...

Is you don't have to re-rip to transcode. I do 192kbps OGG for the Phatbox and usually 128kbps AAC for my phone. Reencoding to something else only takes a few clicks. Ripping in CBR makes no sense these days, with the latest LAME encoder you pretty much get transparency at around 250kbps - 270kbps average VBR.

Storage space is cheap these days, you can fit around 1300 albums in a lossless format on a 500GB HD which you can pick up for around a $100. I personally don't know why anyone wouldn't rip lossless these days.

aside from that I have had some flac files do some strange things on my computer and cause it to lock up.

what do you mean by CBR?