I got an iPod Photo off of eBay last week, and a lot of my music, especially drum corps music (here is an example of such music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WpHEZy-YYM), gets these annoying squeaking noises and artifacts, making it almost unbearable to listen to. Sometimes, the artifacts drown out the music for a moment.
My thinking about why this is is that it's probably the DAC causing the issues, similar to when you watch downloaded videos on an old laptop and you get artifacts in the video.
So my question is, how can I eliminate these artifacts, and am I right about the cause of them? I would like to not spend any more than 40 dollars on this project, by the way.