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techno/audio/phile
by Hugo van der Sanden at 14:30 25/07/06 (Blogs::Hugo)
Shiny?
I'm interested to know what the technophiles think of this, which claims to be "the first audiophile network music player".

I stumbled on a mention of it only because it has a full suite of (open-source) Perl tools available to control it ...

Hugo

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techno/audio/phile Hugo van der Sanden - 14:30 25/07/06
Re: techno/audio/phile Bruce Ure - 15:59 25/07/06
Jon and I looked at the Squeezebox, along with the Roku Soundbridge when we were doing R&D on our amp.

Both seem to have a very good reputation for sound quality. They both have excellent DACs and I think it is fair that they are calling themselves 'audiophile' products. You might meet snobbery of the "how can it POSSIBLY sound as good as my £3,000 CD player?" type but these are people for whom the actual sound of something is much less important than how they believe it sounds.

It looks as though "The Transporter" has an even higher quality DAC and is likely to sound even better to those with the ears to be able to tell the difference (i.e. not me). In fact it looks as if a lot of thought has gone into it. Very sexy.

If I didn't have a very similiar setup here already (Mac or Windows pcs via USB to a stupidly high quality DAC) I would have bought a Squeezebox by now.

I'd buy that over the Soundbridge partly because I prefer the idea of the open source client.

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Re: techno/audio/phile Hugo van der Sanden - 18:40 25/07/06
Hmm, I'd probably play with the perl code and throw away the box, but it's nice to know that I'd be ignoring something that's really good. :)

Hugo

Re: techno/audio/phile Bruce Ure - 19:40 25/07/06
You could always give the box to me :-)

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Re: techno/audio/phile Jonathan Tuppeny - 21:02 25/07/06
There was a piece about this on the bbc site

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5212396.stm

looks like a nice unit but if you already have a battery-powered wonder DAC...
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jht

- Deleted User Account - 23:03 25/07/06
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Re: techno/audio/phile Gordon Hundley - 01:52 29/07/06
All forms of wifi scifi hifi should involve vacuum tubes.
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DrGoon
Re: techno/audio/phile David Crowson - 03:32 29/07/06
luddite ;-p

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bombholio

Re: techno/audio/phile Gordon Hundley - 05:30 29/07/06
Anachronist. :) I certainly don't decry transistors because of their social impact. :P

I suspect that if I had all the money in the world, I'd have some insanely expensive transistor amplifiers and some funky modeling software on a DSP. I think that cheap (in audiophile terms) tubes are more pleasing to the ear than cheap transistors. My hypothesis is that these amp things overload from time to time, and that tubes overloading have a more extreme, but more pleasing distortion. If money were no object, I could have transistor designs that could take extreme transients without overloading, and tubes would just be pretty to look at, but pointless. I could be making shit up, but it would hardly be unknown in the wacky world of audio. :)

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DrGoon