If you have an iPod/iPhone or similar device and want to connect it to a Rotel model that does not have a front USB or dedicated media player input, you can do the following.

The simplest solution is to use a headphone to RCA adapter cable. This cable should have a standard 3.5mm headphone jack on one end, and a pair of stereo RCA connections on the other. Simply connect the RCA end of the cable to an empty input on your Rotel device (do not use the PHONO input, however), then connect the other end of the cable to the headphone output of the iPod. Just select the input on the Rotel that you just connected to and play! Note that you will probably need to turn up the volume on the iPod to near maximum to get enough output on the system, as this method does use the internal volume controls on the iPod/iPhone as well as the Rotel system volume.

This solution is the simplest, but also tends to be the lowest quality as well as this method is utilizing the digital to analog converters and analog circuitry in the iPod or iPhone, which are not typically high quality.

A better solution to consider is an external iPod dock or USB DAC, such as the RDD-1580. The DAC would connect to an analog input on your Rotel model similar to the method above, but with these devices you would then either dock your iPod or connect to the DAC using the normal USB connection cable. The advantage of this method is when the audio from the iPod is obtained via the USB cable it is the digital audio, which allows the critical digital to analog conversion steps to be handled by the DAC and would offer a significant sonic improvement compared to a direct connection via cable. Another advantage is you can usually use a remote control for the DAC to handle basic transport controls like Play/Pause/Track selection, rather than having to manually make these changes on the iPod itself.