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Being an audiophile is not easy these days.

To be fair, I'm not one of the "golden ears" set. You know the type�they can't stand to listen to music unless they're sitting in the stereo sweet spot, and the music is played from a vinyl record on a manual turntable with a moving coil cartridge, through their monoblock tube amplifiers and tube preamp. Call me a "silver ear" audiophile. I'm picky about speakers, and I can't listen to music with too much lossy compression for long periods of time.....

Recently, I lamented how little attention lossless playback had gotten in my commentary on Ten Failed Tech Trends for 2005. An alert reader noted in the ExtremeTech forum that Apple had started supporting a lossless codec, and even supported playback of Apple Lossless on iPods. So I naturally had to pick up a 60GB iPod and re-rip my CD collection using iTunes.

While the iPod and iTunes combination is certainly a potent one, I'm not quite in love with it.....