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>> 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.

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.

Read the specs on these devices. The frequency response and signal-to-noise ratio are identical to competing devices. It may "just sound better to you" -- but such a conclusion is not justified by the hardware design. You might want to consider encoding quality differences as a point of comparison, instead. Here's an interesting test of audio codecs: http://www.rjamorim.com/test/128extension/results.html. While I wouldn't tout those results as "conclusive", they're nonetheless interesting. You probably want to evaluate AAC versus WMA (MP3 is crap, IMHO--don't use it). Both AAC and WMA are lossy formats, which means they tradeoff quality for compression. Consequently, the compression bitrate that you choose has a *huge* impact on the resulting sound quality. Objectively, what you want to compare are two files that are approximately the same size (differences in bitrates, notwithstanding).

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.

That is your personal opinion, not fact.

I've done my own tests and that's my conclusion.

Personal opinion, not fact.

I do consider myself at least somewhat of an audiophile with good relative pitch and (within a range) near perfect pitch.

Once again, personal opinion - not fact.

I consider myself a "sex machine to all the chicks", but that does not make it fact (even if I think it is, although Shaft might also disagree)

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.

I really have no interest in bashing the Ipod. I too have opinions of the Ipod and I have explained them and like all other Apple debates - everything gets wrentched out of proportion. The Ipod is a dandy device and I came very close to buying one but I did not because it was way over priced, the battery issue (not a huge issue to me - it got stretched out of proportion in this debate). I have concerns about the longevity of these little hard drive devices so I didn't want to throw lots of money at it. I compared the Creative Nomad to the Ipod and I found the Ipod has a much better user interface but was absolutely comparable to Nomad in every other category except price. I really got my 40GB Nomad for $179 - sorry but UI and the Apple logo was not worth an additional $220. The only real negative with the Ipod is the price (the battery is just poor design on Apple's part).