Music player recommendations?

It used to that Cowon America players sounded the best. I don't know where they stand now. It's been a few years since I've owned one. They are very cool players though.

If you really must have the best sounding player and can spend some dough, buy a new 5th generation video Ipod on Ebay and send it into Red Wine Audio (redwineaudio.com) for the IMOD treatment. Then go to www.aloaudio.com to get a decent cable, adapter, amp, etc. to go with your new player. Load the player up with AAC files and you'll be good to go!

among the many mp3 players i've owned (ipod, creative zen, sandisk e280, samsung t-9, rio), i can't honestly discern substantial differences in sound quality, at least with compressed mp3 files--all of them served their purpose. of the above, my sense is that the samsung and ipod players had the highest gain and sounded a little better, although the distincitions probably aren't cost-effective. what was much more significant was the headphones--after i pitched the standard earbuds and bought really good, lightweight over-the-ear phones, my enjoyment really peaked. koss portapro and sennheiser px-100 (both easily found for around $40) are absolutely incredible for the price and, to my ears, sound much better even than the pricy shure, etymotic, etc. in-ear stuff.

Lots of good advice here...thanks

Another suggestion for Cowan. Been using an XL5 for quite a while. Excellent sound. Only drawbacks that I don't like is the adapter used for both recharge and line out. Finicky, fragile adapter. But I limit use only to headphone out, and just put up with the recharging.

If more current Cowan models don't have the adapter issue, to me the ideal. Direct transfer from flac archive on my computer for storage and playing on the unit.

And indeed, if just compressed mp3, just pick the easiest to use.

Whatever you get, get some decent 'phones. I use Grados' iGrado and listen to them all day while working and really enjoy them. They stay on when you bend over (or run away from attack dogs!), unlike the portable Sennheisers I had (they sounded good too though).