It goes without saying that Audiophiles love great sound quality. These are enthusiasts who can hear the audio differences that equipment and speakers can make. For these people, the MP3 format is downright crap, and many lump in the MP4 format used by default within iTunes/iPod (AAC encoding) with the sound quality of MP3, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The MP4 format can sound every bit as good or close enough to CD quality playback. Just don’t expect an iPod to do it for you if you’re an audiophile.

The Dumb Reviewer
I’ve seen many an industry HT reviewer drone on about how the iPod doesn’t hold a stick to CD playback. The reviews typically go along the lines of something like…

• Magazine reviewer states how the love their iPod
• Some circumstance or review causes them to use a dedicated CD player often costing $1000+
• They realize how much sound quality they’re not getting from the iPod and thus equate that to the MP4 format.

To me the above conclusion is appalling in it’s stupidity, and only adds to the misinformation out there. Of course a $300 iPod does not, and will not, sound as good as dedicated $1000+ CD player. Nor does a portable CD player either. The iPod is a great portable MP4/MP3 player, and for many people (except audiophiles) is equally good when connected to a stereo/home theater.

The iPod is a great portable player costing $150-$400 that has not just playback circuitry, but also has a hard drive/flash memory, an Operating System, battery power supply, interface connectors, and an enclosure all in a downright demure package.

The iPod is built to serve its role well as a portable music player, which can do double duty in the car with great audio quality. When it comes to connecting the iPod to an audiophile grade home theater system it is unreasonable to expect the diminutive player to perform like audiophile grade equipment.

That doesn’t mean the MP4 format is bad, it means the iPod’s audio circuitry can only go so far, but there is a way to make those MP4s in iTunes shine so an audiophile can experience all of the convenience nirvana of music management and playback that iTunes offers.

How To Get It Done With MP4 – Audiophile Style
To get audiophile sound quality from MP4 you can’t achieve that with an iPod, but you can with iTunes on a computer. iTunes offers a ton advantages over the iPod such as full music management, search functions, encoding, advanced playback options, full computer processing power, access to the iTunes Music Store, and most importantly… high sound quality with equalizer capabilities.

Connecting Your iTunes Library To Your Home Theater / Stereo
There are a few options to get your iTunes library to playback through your system. There are other methods, but many of them place limitations on playback of music purchased through the iTunes Music Store. The following will allow you to play anything in your music library.

• The Long Ass Cable Connection
• Second Computer / Laptop
• Airport Express – Wireless Internet router with music streaming capabilities from iTunes

The Long Ass Cable Connection
The most rudimentary and simplistically reliable method of connecting your PC to a home theater is by using a long cable connection. The main problem with this method is that long cable runs of high-quality cable are expensive. This solution is often more expensive than the wireless connection method.

The upside is that it can be really easy and reliable with no wireless routers to configure. Just run the cable, plug it in, and it works.

Second Computer / Laptop
If you have a second computer you could opt to use it as a jukebox in your home theater by having it connect to your main PC’s music library via Ethernet or wireless, or simply use the second computer as your master music library.

The huge benefit with this solution is you can select the music in the same room as your home theater. Any other connection method requires you to go where your master computer resides, which can become annoying. This is also the priciest solution, as you’ll now have to maintain another computer.

Airport Express
Apple makes a nifty little wireless router that can also be used to serve music to specific rooms. The Airport Express comes with an audio Optical/Mini jack that can connect either digitally with a Digital Optical Cable, or with an analog mini jack to 2-channel RCA connection.

Once you setup the Airport Express Router and tell iTunes to “look for remote speakers” in its preferences, a pull down menu appears in the bottom right corner enabling you to select the room (or rooms) to route your music to. You can have multiple rooms play at once or a single room play.

The Airport Express is indeed the most elegant solution, and at $129, it is quite possibly the cheapest method you can use to easily serve music to your home theater or any other room in the house for that matter with sound quality just the same as having your computer directly connected.

Equalization
After you get it all connected you may need to play with the iTunes equalizer to get the sound dialed in and highly comparable to an audiophile CD component. If you play same song in both it shouldn’t take too long to get it perfect.

If your using a long cable run or dedicated computer be sure to set the volume to the maximum level in iTunes to make your music sound right. With Airport Express you can turn off “remote speaker volume management” in the iTunes preferences to receive a purer signal.

Why Go Through All This?
Sure you could just use a CD, SACD, or DVD-A format and forget about the MP4 format, but it’s the music management options such as playlists, moving songs around, searchability, quick access to your entire library, equalization, the music store, and the elegant iTunes interface that makes it all worthwhile.

Finding the hidden gems of musical nirvana becomes as easy as typing the name and pressing play; all without having to fumble through hundreds or thousands of CDs to do so. On top of that, you get portability either through an iPod or burning your playlists to CD.

Audiophiles should definitely take the MP4 format solution seriously. Hell, you can do a quick test by connecting a computer up temporarily, importing a few songs from your CDs to iTunes, and tinkering around. You may be surprised at what you find. Just bring an open mind.