It's a complete crock. Most MP3 players today, and iPods for their entire history, offer pretty much perfect audio reproduction (modulo lossiness in MP3). Plenty of folks don't like the earbuds and, to be sure, the iPod was not technically superior to its rivals on first release -- the thing that made the iPod successful was end-to-end near seamless experience including purchasing of music, redownloading lost content, ripping music, managing library, syncing to devices, and so forth, which Apple's rivals repeatedly and ineptly failed to reproduce (Microsoft came close, with Zune, but it was too little too late). And yes, iTunes on Windows is a slug, etc., but rival products were always in some crucial respect worse.

Well, it's probably true when "other" is used to designate very specific high-sound-quality models (e.g. Cowon a few years ago, not sure where they stand now), you can always find better and ipods are of average sound quality at best, they've never been an audiophile's PMP (or a PMP for driving high-impedance cans).

It's a completely pointless statement though.

The DACs are pretty much the same as you could find in any other mp3 player. The cowon ones and so on were somewhat better, but not massively so. You can see a battery of tests performed on various ipods as well as professional DACs costing thousands of $ here: http://www.daefeatures.co.uk/rmaa.php

They don't kick out a lot of power, so they don't cope well with fancy headphones.

The bad reputation of the ipod's sound stems largely from those white earbuds that came in the box, which are genuinely abominable. That and confirmation bias/placebo/etc.

I think it's more accurate to say the iPod (which one?) was not superior in all aspects of an MP3 player (especially in price). But IMO it had a very healthy balance of well done properties and good design. It was a device easy to love because unlike most other devices, it had way fewer glaring flaws and frustrating UI decisions.

TL;DR: It's better to be great overall than excelling at just some features while also having crappy downfalls.

As someone who used to be in to audiophilia, debates on sound quality of equipment and the supposed night and day differences are an incredible exercise in futility and purchase justification. Smoke some cannabis and $5 earbuds fed by a no-name MP3 player will deliver more detail than the custom modded Sennheisers fed by an amp and DAC stack imported from a boutique in Belgium would have gotten you otherwise.

One advantage to growing older is that since you can no longer hear the difference between lo-fi and hi-fi, audio equipment gets a lot less expensive!

I have one that never used, besides the first days as it was a gift and I already had a mp3 player.

I always found the menu wheel too fragile.