"Used" iPod Classic prices coming down

A few months ago they were as high as $499 for a 160 GB model. A quick look at Amazon US shows that they seem to have dropped to $200 and below. Looks like streaming and higher-capacity (256GB) cell phones and tablets are digging into the market for my old favorites.
Six months ago I had "just" a 160 with headphone jack problems; now I have a 160 and a 120, one with a headphone jack assembly and HD replacement, t'other (which had been sitting around for four years) with a new HD, plus an iPad with 128 and an iPhone with 64. I am awash in capacity, so now I am syncing Apple Lossless. Not sure of a sound difference to these older ears, but it's nice to have.

 

I am still enjoying my 160GB Classic. I suppose one of these days I will have to replace the battery. I have not used all of the 160GB capacity yet.
I have added music (325 AAC files) gradually over the years, from cds and cdr needle-drops. I occasionally delete music from the iPod, to keep it "lean"
and organized. I don't believe in "collecting" music. If I don't play it, it's gone...

 

I would be concerned about parts availability - specifically battery and storage, but other parts too - click wheel, connectors and displays.

That said, in a lot of ways the Classic design was more user-friendly than current models. I have approximately 3200 songs on a 128GB touch and it frequently freezes.

 

I thought it was a terrible idea to discontinue the Classic, but honestly the only time we ever use it is on extended road trips. We don’t stream music like many do, so that isn’t the reason. It’s just that our iPhones hold enough music for day to day usage, and if want different music then connecting to the desktop is a snap. 160gb isn’t enough to hold all of my music anymore anyways, if I wanted to at the time I upgraded to my iphone 7 I could have gotten one that held 256gb. Not that all could go towards music but it would have been an acceptable substitute.

 

I'm purely typing this out in case you'd like to explore other players because to be blunt, I've always found Apple devices to sound terrible. After getting a Cowon, it was night & day. It's not a household name but their players sound utterly wonderful. I've done comparisons with plenty of people ; every one of them favored the Cowon but none of them preferred Cowon's user interface. Apple's, I freely admit, is superior in every way. It's simple, intuitive, and fast. In contrast, Cowon's has a slight learning curve but afterward, it's smooth sailing. The huge sound quality upgrade was more than worth it.

Here's an example of a player with 256GB, expandable via SD card to 512GB.

[ Welcome to COWONGLOBAL.com ]

 

It will never happen, but it would be nice if Apple licensed some of their iPod patents to other manufacturers.

 

Why? Other makers - Astell & Kern and Fiio come to mind - have already designed, built and marketed better portable digital audio players. By “better” I mean player that are as or more intuitively usable, players that integrate better quality DACs, players with more versatile headphone connections, and players that offer broad compatibility with a variety of top quality desktop software for wired and wireless syncing, etc., etc., etc.

 

The Classic's time has come and gone. That is not to say that the classic does not have uses for some, including myself. I have a Nano still in my car, loaded with mp3 music files and love the interface while driving. My Classic 160 GB is hooked up to an HRT istreamer, and gets some use in the house.

 

The problem with newer versions of Apple devices (and of course not just Apple) is they're overloaded with features and app crap that people rarely use. The 160 functioned simply and had a large capacity (and I have a lot of music). My 160 eventually become nonfunctional. I'm guessing the drive went. There are any number of large capacity alternatives that don't sync quite as well with Apple. In addition there are upgrade roads that involve replacing the drive with a high capacity SSD (expensive) along with replacing the battery. I finally bit the bullet and bought a 120 which is basically an iPhone without the phone. I would have bought a 160 in a minute if it was still available.

 

Agree on every point apart from the absurd "Apple devices have always sounded terrible" hyperbole.



Apple singlehandedly created the idea of a hi-fi pocket music player with a great user interface, but pursuing the iPhone as Swiss Army knife and Apple Music as a streaming app increasingly incompatible with playing your own music files means that Apple has opened up a huge opportunity for inexpensive high-quality DAPs, which are now catching up with headphones in terms of price/performance excellence.

Nothing wrong with loving and using a museum piece like the iPod Classic, but now that Apple has abandoned dedicated music players, people who like me who want a modern dedicated music player can abandon Apple and find great options.

 

Non-Apple devices are incompatible devices with 30-pin or Lightning connectors - my car audio system for example.

 

Nothing wrong with tastes but I am speaking from experience. Have you ever pitted a Cowon player against an iPod? I have, regularly. Also against iPhones. The Cowon slaughtered everything. Not even close. It's not fanboyism. I couldn't care less about brands - I just go wherever my subjective opinion of what gives me the best sound takes me. If something comes along that slaughters the Cowon, I'll gladly buy that other product. Only calling a spade a spade.

As for the iPod Classic, people who love to tinker can always install RockBox which is essentially a custom firmware developed by sharp minds who wanted to grant that player (and others) with more capabilities and features than the manufacturer's allowed. The best part is it's free!

 

I toyed with updating/refurbishing my U2 iPod, but chickened out...

Ken Rockwell cheerleads a little too hard but his iPhone measurements and SQ assessments are pretty compelling, for example:

iPhone 6S Plus Audio Quality & Measurements

I like my iPhone (a 5s that still works great) but the sound excellence of the Hidizs DAP and iFi Nano iDSD Black Label DAC/amp I use for portable listening now is out of this world.

 

That's interesting. However, it's not the first audio circuit that measures well but that I dislike the sound of.

For instance, maybe it's quiet and neutral and all that jazz but when push comes to shove, I want sounds that make me tap my foot and has a certain liveliness to it. A stock iPod/iPhone just can't deliver that sort of sound, in my experience. The EQ options make next to no difference.

I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on a Cowon player. It'd be a fun comparison to read about, even if you'd prefer the iPhone. In the end, we're both happy with what we ended up so it's all good.

 

I love my two ipods. I use a 7th gen ipod with 768gb of storage as my main source these days. This ipod is attached to a Nuforce icon ido which sends the ipods digital signal to my dac. It sounds identical to the mac mini feeding the dac.

My other ipod is a 5th gen with 512gb of storage and a fairly new battery. It sounds great using the line out to mu Nuforce HDP amp. I love the sound of these devices the way I use them. If I need a portable device I'll take the 5th gen with me. It sounds great to me. To be honest though, when sitting on an airplane with iems, audiophile sound is not what I'm after.

Here's an image from the 7th gen.

 

I have an iPod Classic (*) and one of the features I like about it is that I can customize the menus so that I only see the items that I actually use on the device and put the most-used items on the top menu. I like that I can hide things that I don't need or will not use, such as videos, pictures, and games.

Despite the move away from dedicated music players, I think there is still a viable market for them. Many people just want a great-sounding device that is easy to use without a large number of never-used features. For the same reason, it is why I use a flip phone rather than a smartphone.

It's unfortunate that Apple didn't continue the iPod Classic in a new form, with a memory card slot or a solid-state drive rather than a hard drive. I think that it would have the potential to be a sleeper success (not a massive seller but a reliably profitable product).

* I purchased the 160gb version, and bought it just before they discontinued it although I didn't know that was going to happen at the time. I wanted one for the large capacity and the tactile controls.

 

I have an old iPod Photo 60 gig...original battery and still going strong.

 

You are undoubtedly correct about pins and connectors.

I personally don’t care about third-party licensing of Apple’s closed eco-system and different generations of proprietary cable connectivity. I care about sound quality. Besides that, my personal estimate is that the vast majority of car owners who are using digital music systems in their cars are connecting the in-car system to a portable device (most typically a smartphone) via Bluetooth these days. Convenient, average to poor sound quality (albeit better than earlier generations of Bluetooth), and it’s in a moving car with road noise, the need to concentrate on traffic and driving and staying alert. Not the ideal environment for careful music listening. I can’t remember the last time I saw any friend, family member, acquaintance or business associate use a wired connection in their cars. They’re all - to a one - using Bluetooth. Don’t need third-party licensing of Apple’s hardware connection ports for that.

 

Cowon?

Those of You That Listen to Music on the Go...

My smartphone actually beats out my old D2. I'd pit it against my long sold S9 as well, I bet it would be a pretty close match.

What I've learned over the years is that a lot of this depends not only on the DAP, but also the amp / headphone pairing as well.

 

So there are two of us left, whattya know! I love when people mockingly comment on my use of the flip phone. I immediately launch into a speech about reel to reel tape "you think this is old......"? Lol!

 

Agreed. What smartphone is that?

 

Alcatel 4S (Windows 10 Phone). Happily surprised when paired with an app with an EQ + my amp and cans.

My old Cowon D2 is still a trooper though. Good battery life as well and I have Rockbox on it (allows the SD slot to take larger cards that way).

 

True but the sound is *radically* changed. The manufacturer firmware features the amazing BBE EQ which sounds infinitely better than anything else. RockBox sounds tame and lifeless in contrast, at least on my X5. Quickly went back to the regular firmware and haven't gone back since. Tried the SD card setup but would occasionally experience off behavior requiring me to reset the player which I found annoying. Tried multiple cards from different manufacturers, too.

In the end, bought a bigger HD for the same amount one of those cards cost. Oh well... It was still fun to experiment regardless.

 

Still use the 60 gig here in the car.

 

The day after the 160GB Classic was discontinued, I purchased every new one I could find within a 25-mile radius. That was two! They are still unwrapped in the original boxes because my original 160GB Classic is still working just fine. My wife suggesting I should sell at least one of them when the prices were up around $600 but I passed. It is quite possible I could die before the original Classic does, but then I won't really need to worry about the opportunities I lost in not selling the spares!