There are two things that make a fifth-generation iPod worth keeping. The way it sounds, and the way it feels in your hand. Both come from somewhere.
The sound comes from Scotland.
Between 2005 and 2006, Apple's fifth-generation iPod carried a digital-to-analog converter made by Wolfson Microelectronics — a company spun out of the University of Edinburgh in 1984. That chip, the WM8758, is why these iPods are still hunted down two decades later: a warmer, more analog character that the players after them never quite recovered. In 2007, the sixth-generation iPod Classic switched to a Cirrus Logic converter. The fifth-generation machines were the last full-size, hard-drive iPods to leave the factory with a Wolfson DAC inside. There is a quiet epilogue to this: in 2014, Cirrus Logic bought Wolfson outright. The company whose sound Apple had left behind was absorbed by the very company that replaced it.
The body comes from Japan.
In 2001, when Steve Jobs set out to build the first iPod, he wanted a mirror-polished stainless steel back — and could not find a modern forge able to produce that finish at the quality he demanded. Apple turned to Tsubame-Sanjo, a metalworking district in Niigata that had been perfecting the art of polishing steel since the Edo period. The craftsmen there hand-buffed the iPod's back to a mirror, and that mirror became the iPod's signature. The machine in front of you carries the same mirror-polished back the line was born with.
I restore it by hand.
I am a Japanese craftsman based in Tokyo. Two decades of pockets and desks leave their marks on that stainless back — fine scratches, dullness, the wear of a life lived. I bring the mirror back with my own polishing method, worked by hand, the way the finish was meant to be. And the one thing I never touch is the Wolfson DAC. Everything time wears out — the battery, the drive — is renewed. The soul of the machine is left exactly as it was.
That is what you are ordering from Tokyo: the last Wolfson generation, its sound preserved and its body brought back to the finish it began with.
Wolfson, Shure, and Me — A Word from Yutaka, The Creator
That is the machine. Here is why I make it.
I started this work because of where I come from, and where I find myself now.
I grew up in the golden age of records and stereo equipment — and in a house with room enough for it. I discovered Western music, chased the weekly hit charts on the radio, and honestly, that was all I listened to. With what little pocket money I had, and what I earned delivering newspapers, I bought audio equipment piece by piece, and I spent my youth chasing the best sound I could build with my own hands.
I'd buy a new record, wait until my parents were out, and play it at full volume — and in those days, no one scolded you for it. It was a good time to be alive.
As the years passed, I found work, I had a family, and through all the busyness, Western music was always with me. But the reverse happened too: homes grew smaller, noise complaints and the rest of it made it impossible to keep real audio equipment anymore. Mini-components, then portable CD players, MDs, MP3 players — year by year, everything shrank, and somehow that shrinking was celebrated. A lonely age had arrived.
But then a genius appeared, and reached out a hand to audio refugees like me. You know him: the late Steve Jobs.
That was when I thought, "I'll collect every digital track I can" — and I'm still gathering them to this day. Why? Because it's simply in my nature.
And then, just as I was about to step into my later years, I learned about the "modded" iPod. "What — a Wolfson iPod that can hold more than 50,000 tracks?!" The moment I heard it, a strong urge took hold of me: "I have to do this myself." I quit my dull salaryman job and built my own "Unit Zero."
Problems came, of course. The biggest: my Wolfson-equipped Unit Zero, on its original iOS, wouldn't run 50,000 tracks — not even half that. What solved it was a single whisper from a friend: "There's this thing called Rockbox." "If it lets me hear the sound I love, it doesn't have to be iOS!" I switched my thinking on the spot, and set out to build and tune "Wolfson + Rockbox."
It was finished.
The sound it made, played through my beloved Shure SRH840 — I think you can imagine how it delighted a man on the edge of his later years, who had once been an "audio boy."
I want to rescue audio refugees like me.
If you're wealthy enough to install a full audio system, you have no trouble. But such people were never "audio refugees" to begin with — and they're not really my kind of people, either.
"It's fine. Even five minutes of peace is enough."
This, right here, is the creed of an audio refugee like me.
I hope to share, with as many people as I can, a Wolfson iPod polished — with a mirror-finishing method I spent days teaching myself — until it makes you forget the twenty-odd years that have passed over it.
That, and only that, is why I polish.
— Yutaka, The Creator, Tokyo