Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions iPOD through A/V Receiver

So the noise is from the iPod itself, right? I think that's normal. My wife has a current gen 30gb, and she used to have a previous gen 20gb. Both make the same noises. My iPod Nano doesn't and it shouldn't because it's flash based.

If I'm understanding your problem correctly, it sounds like you are hearing the hard drive spin up & down when the iPod loads the file. It's a whine of the drive spinning and the tick-tick-tick of the hard drive heads finding the file(s) to play. It may be that the stand/dock is amplifying the sound by placing the iPod up against a hard surface. However, this shouldn't affect the sound quality of the music and you mention hearing static - so that does not sound normal.

I play music from both of the iPods on my receiver, but connected via a 25ft RCA cable to miniplug adapter -not a fancy dock. The iPod sits next to the couch and I select songs on it directly. If I hold the iPod, or set it down on the couch, it's harder to hear the HD noises. If I leave it on the coffee table, then the hd noises are more noticable. Still, none of the noises affect the sound that's sent to my receiver, so audio quality is as expected (apple lossless vs. 128kb mp3, etc). No humming or static.

FYI, I recently purchased and subsequently returned a Griffin iPod dock that offered similar functionality as you describe. Dock iPod, navigate tracks on TV, music through stereo. It was awful. So many buzzes, whines, and thumps that it was absolutely un-listenable. Loud thumps on changing tracks, constant whine in the background that changed pitch with the dock's volume level, and otherwise degraded sound quality compared to my el-cheapo radioshack miniplug-to-RCA cable.