Is there any means to bypass the internal DAC? Perhaps that would offer more promise, and better playback at home.
Nope, there's no way to bypass the internal DAC, aka no digital out. Even for analogue line-out, you have to buy either a Sik Din attachment or Pocketdock. But this is not unusual as most portable digital players lack digital out.
One of the very few players that has digital out is iRiver iHP140, which offers an optical digital out, but the quality of digital out and/or jitter is not going to be very good. This is a good player, too, but it does NOT support any lossless files. So either you use mp3 type compresssion or full .wav files, which is impractical due to huge sizes. I can't even think of any other players right now that has optical out, b/c even the newer iRiver players now don't have digital out.
There's only a couple of players out there that supports some sort of lossless files. One is iPod, which is why I use it, and the other is Rio Karma. Rio Karma does not have digital out, either and is much thicker and funny-looking than iPod IMO.
So for true high-fidelity hard drive sound, one has to go with real PC or laptop with good spdif out or something like modded Transit..
But for something like lower-resolution bedroom system or something, iPod's line-out is good enough to provide fun music that will play for days on random "shuffle" mode.
