Best Portable Sound

Recent threads on this board have discussed the pros and cons of downloaded music and the impending death of CD's. Having just received an Apple iPod, I have had an "ear-opening" experience, which leads me to the conclusion that CD's are here to stay if anyone with compassion for an artist's vision has a say. I say this because there is a silent gap between each track of an album when played back on an iPod. This means that classical music, or any music recorded with seamless segues between tracks becomes butchered when played back on an iPod! Imagine listening to "Dark Side of the Moon" or "La Traviata" with gaps between the tracks. I thought the days of carrying my CD player on airplanes was over, but now I have to wonder. And, my God, why would anyone download an album from Apple's music service when what you're hearing isn't the way the album was mixed? The iPod is a great piece of portable electronic gear, in my opinion, because of the convenience and sound quality, but the "Gap" issue is unforgiveable. Anyone know of a fix? Apple are you listening?

Found a solution to the iPod gap problem, though it's not ideal. Essentially, using iTunes you select all the tracks on a CD that are supposed to play seamlessly and then select the iTunes "Join CD Tracks" feature before importing. iTunes then imports the selected tracks as one file. Once you've joined the tracks together, however, you can't skip ahead or back from track to track; you're left only the scroll option. See the instructions at
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93079

I have a minidisk deck and portables for about 5 years, and AFAIK they always compress audio, at least with ATRAC3 for 80min, which is yet tolerable, but it's still MP3-kind of... Don't really use them anymore... IPOD might be the best, I don't know if its DAC any better then in a good portable CDPs. However, you at least eliminate poor optical reading mechanism of portables, so assuming you've done very good audio extraction, you can get some better quality.

About the Gaps. Try to go into Preferences in iTunes. Under Importing you can adjust the gap between songs. If you set it to No Gap it records the CD just the way it sounds. This should work. Let me know!

In my version 4 of iTunes, the No Gap feature is only selectable as a Burning option. The No Gap feature still results in gaps between tracks when they are downloaded to the iPod. As I posted earlier, in my experience the only work around to the iPod gaps is to select "Join CD Tracks" in the Advanced section of the iTunes menu.