Music player recommendations?

If your looking for pure quality...Beosound 6 is pretty tough to beat.

http://www.bang-olufsen.com/beosound6

Apple iPod Classic w/ Shure e530 earphones...got me through a longer-than-$%#@ flight to New Zealand! If you want a little more fidelity, add a Headroom AirHead or BitHead portable amp and you're good-to-go!!!

One can argue all day long about other players sounding better than the [non-Nano, non-Shuffle] iPod, but no other player offers the same combination of sound quality, ease of use, and ease of music storage/syncronization (iTunes).

If you've never even had a player you just gotta get a iPod first. Get a 32GB touch if you want to sacrifice space but be able to surf the internet via wi-fi...plus you can run apps(tons of stuff even if you're not a "gamer"...chess, mancala, sudoku, etc.). Get a classic if you just want tons of space for music.

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.