Apple's 30GB iPod is an extremely sexy gadget. As a piece of industrial design, it is remarkable in its beauty and operability. As an extension of Apple's lifestyle-friendly suite of music-photography-video applications, it is a screaming success.

It's fun to use, and if just seeing one is enough to induce lust, actually holding one is enough to tempt a righteous man to larceny. But is it a serious piece of kit worthy of serious consideration by an audiophile?

YES! YES! and YES!
 

Every aspect ot the iPod rings with pure audiophile quality. Internal parts choices were made with an emphasis on sound quality considerations. Parts vetted include the very highly regarded Wolfson Microelectronics D/A converter!  What's missing are the GROSSEST sources of error in a CD player... the inherently wobbly' motor and a mechanical laser assembly.

Choose the right format.
The high-resolution ripping option is AIFF. The format creates files that contain the raw audio data, channel information (monophonic or stereophonic), bit depth, and sample rate, as well as application-specific data areas, which allow different applications to add information to the file header that aren't removed when the files are processed by other applications—a feature of greater interest to folks who create music on their computers than to those of us transferring pre-recorded music to our storage media. In other words, AIFF is a memory hog, but it's an audiophile's kind of memory hog, since it throws away no data in an attempt to compress the file size.

Flexabilty and the lucid music library.
Even though the new iPod maxes out at 30GB, it's probably best not to think of it as the permanent repository of your entire music collection. That's what iTunes4 and your computer are for. With FireWire's high-speed data transfer, it's a matter of a few minutes and a few keystrokes to pack the iPod with situation-specific playlists. Download the appropriate music program for the evening ripped in AIFF—it'll match the original for sound quality, but last for hours and hours.