Moaning about the sound quality of a portable music player is like buying The Sun and moaning about the lack of proper journalism. It's a *portable* music player. It holds a day's worth of music. What more do you want? A coffee machine? I agree about the nasty sound of AAC, so just use 320KB MP3 and buy some decent headphones. I'm a Hi-Fi nerd who has in the past used a green pen on my CDs (just as an experiment, you understand, I didn't inhale) and the iPod does everythingI expect of it in sound quality terms - which isn't much but it's enough.