Yes, one of the long-running flaws the iPod line is that they all insert a gap between songs, even if the gap wasn't there on the original CD. However, the gap can be measured in milliseconds; it's not a three-second silence, and more a momentary annoyance than a fatal flaw in the hardware design as the link in >>2 seems to make it out to be.

There's a way around it, if you're ripping your own CDs, but it's inelegant; you basically tell the iPod to rip the contiguous songs as one large song file. This makes it impossible to "next track" through the contiguous tracks. But it works, and I've done it for a couple of non-stop dance music CDs I have. Also, Apple themselves sell songs that shouldn't have a gap on the iTunes Music Store... It really is a flaw they should have fixed a long time ago. (The hardware just needs to be smart enough to start loading the next song into memory before the current song has finished playing.)

So does this address your problem? I'm still confused by the "three-second gap" thing... Was I right in assuming you just weren't used to hearing the original on-CD gap because of the crossfade playback feature?