I just have second hand ipod touches and manage my collection by burning cds through media monkey to them. There is so many mp3 players out there that look good but when you get them the software is junk.
Why would anyone need a dedicated piece of hardware to play mp3s these days? My $250 smartphone accepts SD cards up to 1 terabyte, plays flacs, and runs whatever media software you want. I was using GoneMad until updates turned that to shit and now I’m happily using PowerAmp. But there are dozens of others I haven’t even tried.
I had a 5th Gen iPod video back in 2006 and loved the thing like it was my firstborn child but eventually it broke and I got a smartphone and have never felt the need for another one.
Output quality is a reason. Even if you have headphone jack, it’s usually built as cheaply as possible. Granted, Bluetooth headsets can be OK these days.
Come to think of it, do Bluetooth headphones only use class D amplifiers? Seems like it’d be hard to fit any kind of decent class AB amp in there. Class D amps have improved a lot in recent years, but you still want to use an AB if you’re serious (not even audiophile nonsense, just somewhat serious).
Class d would be the smart option if you were building a battery powered headphone amp.
The audio decoder chip in the old first generation airpods had a class d (trade name class h) amp good for a couple of watts into four ohms in it. Iirc the ones used after that aren’t much different.
There’s so much tomfoolery going on with any signal coming from a smartphone you’re probably barking up the wrong tree worrying about the type of amplifier in your headphones. Between the software decoding and applying all sorts of effects to the source signal before it’s possibly transcoded to something the bluetooth chip can easily handle and manage buffers of then picked up by the processor in the headphones, possibly further effects applied then finally passed to the audio codec chip that can apply a final set of nyquist stuff to it before driving it into the actual speaker.
The sound quality out of switching amps driven from batteries though is pretty phenomenal in my experience.
I had the first gen iPod 20 BG, that heavy white brick. It was glorious, the only focus was to hear music. There was like 19.5 GB just for your music, nothing else installed, than the music player. The mini LCD screen was perfect and quick.
Also loved my Nano ipod Video, the last nano.
