Hark! These Herald Headphones Sing

Editor's Note: Gary Krakow is an award-winning journalist whose columns help feed his personal passion for playing with gadgets of all types, shapes and sizes. Today we bring you part two of Gary's high-end holiday buying guide. Stay tuned to this space for more and click here for part one and here for part two.

There are many ways to make your portable music listening experience more enjoyable.

The first step is larger music files. You wouldn't settle for low-definition television -- why not high-definition audio too? The best sound comes from large WAV files (true CD quality). The problem with these uncompressed files is that you can't fit nearly as many tunes on your portable device.

The stuff you usually buy via the online music services is a compromise between near-CD sound quality and small file size. The smaller the files, the worse it sounds, but the more songs you can fit on your portable device. ...