Wondering if there is a sound difference between sound from xbox or ipod (via the rca's) vs something like phatbox (sat wire connection) vs the stock cd???

 

Perhaps a minor sound quality difference, but what really matters is what bit rate you encode your MP3's at. For decent sound quality, don't use anything less than 192 kbps. All of mine are at 256 kbps. Of course, I burn my own MP3s from CD's I bought, rather than buy/steal them online.

Anyways, I have the phatbox, and it sounds great.
Dave

 

There is a Infiniti Phatbox sale on Ebay. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...778310572&rd=1

 

i run mostly 192 bit rate mp3s on my phatbox and i think the sound is very good. Sounds better than a cd burned with the same mp3 files. Can't comment on the sound of an xbox being used with the pac audio.

 

If everything being equal, same sound compression etc etc, how does xbox compare to stock cd player (playing a mp3 converted to wave) vs phatbox?

 

The XBOX sounds fine. Loudness is well matched. However, XBox Media Center seems to output a fairly low audio when playing video files. There is a way to adjust this in XBMC, but it tried to digitally increase the volume and does a rather poor job of it. Movies are currently played at a level of 20+ while I typically listen to CD's at a max of 15. Kind of sucks when you go from XBox to CD. You get a nice blast of music if you forget to turn it down first. The start up flubber sound and games are just as loud as CD's. I haven't tried out music on it yet.

 

Im thinking of using xbox as a mp3 player mostly, hey if anyone has cheap xboxes for sale, let me know ;P