Do you have anything to back this up other than your undying love for all things Apple?
* Unless you convert it to Apple's lossless format. No, not uncompressed, just lossless compressed.
Whenever you go from one compression scheme to another you degrade the quality - it has nothing to do with lossless or not (that only applies to if the file can be reconstituted to its original form which is of very little interest in audio compression).
You can't look up anything for yourself, can you? If you've been into digital audio as long as I have*, you'd know. AAC just sounds better at the same bitrate. For a more in-depth review, check out this article from a PC-centric site. Notice the poor sound reproduction and nasty cut-off of WMA?
Whenever you go from one compression scheme to another you degrade the quality
Nope. Whenever you compress into a lossy format you degrade the quality. Converting from WMA to a lossless format will give you exactly the same audio quality as you get playing the WMA file.
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I lived 30 minutes from the Frauenhofer institute, which created the MP3 format, and had a friend who worked there. He hooked me on to it not long after it was created, and I loved it since I was tired of only being able to choose from one CD worth of music at a time before swapping CDs.
>> Do you have anything to back this up other than your undying love for all things Apple?<<
In fairness to the iPod (I have a 40g model), the AAC format in particular and the iPod device in general sound much better than competing devices. I've done my own tests and that's my conclusion. If it means anything, I do consider myself at least somewhat of an audiophile with good relative pitch and (within a range) near perfect pitch.
And I think you will find that my opinions of Apple in general come closer to yours, but I bought my iPod because I consider it a better device. Overpriced? Yes, as all Apple products are.