Best portable music player for lossless music

[ben_j_davis]

Recently I have been ripping CD's to FLAC format instead of mp3 as I wanted to get the best out of my (reasonably good) sound system.

True it's difficult to tell a difference from a decent Lame mp3 rip to a FLAC rip, so maybe I'm wasting my time.

But anyway

As I spend a large amount of time commuting, I spend a lot listening to music. I have nice in-ear headphones so it would be nice to listen to my lossless music on the go.

Here is where my problems begin, as i'm trying to find a music player which:

Reasonably priced,
Plays lossless music (or a player which can use Rockbox)
Large capacity (at least 20 gig otherwise what's the point?)
Good sound quality
Small and sturdy
Good battery life.

The first thing I looked at was the Cowon iAudio X5, however after reading a few reviews, it turns out that it breaks easily if dropped and the music navigation (the way it's listed) is as basic as it gets.

All Creatives do not support bit-rate higher than 320kbps

The new iPod Classic whilst having big storage capacity and better battery life, apparently has poorer sound quality than previous generation's (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1126861&tstart=0).

Most other players that support lossless music are either 4 GB or £400.

So really it comes down to either a 80gig iPod Classic (re-ripping everything to Apple Lossless), or the older 80gig 5.5 which i can install Rockbox on.


Any suggestions?


Thanks
Ben

 

[ben_j_davis]

True it is very difficult to tell the difference, sometimes almost impossible. 99.9% of my music are LAME encoded MP3's. However, I will continue to rip songs in a lossless format as better hardware is bound to come along in the future. Rather like I continue to keep photo's in massive resolutions and non JPEG formats. Just because I don't have a monitor now that can display them full screen doesn't mean I won't be able to in the future. If lossless music is no different to a 128Kbp Mp3 then why do studios spend so much money on equipment?

Then why do I want a portable player that supports lossless music? I just happened to download quite a bit of music that was in FLAC format and it would be a shame only to here it at home.

 

[ben_j_davis]

That's true, I guess I'm asking too much for something that only cost's a few hundred quid.

Just been looking at the Zune 2, looks pretty sweet. As long as the don't swap the $ for £ sign, it will probably be in the £150-180 range. Although I don't know what the sound quality is like. I'm still thinking my best bet is the older generation iPod.