Digital Audio Receiver… the “new” transport


Digital Audio Receiver… the “new” transport

I am trying to get a sense as to what make of Digital Audio Receiver fellow audiogoners are using (if at all) with the audio systems. It has been discussed elsewhere in these forums the advantages of DAR’s over CD transport (and of course the disadvantages). The high end audio community have been slow to pick up the DAR, with the majority of products catering towards the desktop crowd, with matching emphasis on audio quality.

I have been using an Audiotron by Turtle beach for the last 18 months, (see my system link (http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vstrt&1074394694&read&3&4&) and all things considered, I still think it is one of the better options available. The reason I chose it are multi-fold but in a nutshell it offered the following that non of the competition did:
1. Digital out (toslink): Believe it or not the vast majority of these products only offer 2 analog RCA outs, meaning you have to rely on a $2 built in DAC on the front end… bzzzz next.
2. Web interface: The consol can be controlled by any networked device, including a PDA. With over 5000 digital music files, a tree / folder approach is the natural choice over scrolling by a remote. The device control is also very intuitive, and the only one using a toggle dial similar in concept to the iPod
3. Plug and play ether net connectivity and no server side software installs. This means that your music files can be stored somewhere on a NAS (network associated storage) or another PC running LINUX.
4. Device display: A bright display that allows you to see what playing without having your TV or computer on. It also fits in a standard rack

All this said the Audiotron (AT) does have some serious pitfalls. It built in DAC is all but garbage, which means using your own (which as stated above is preferable). Its user interface is looking a little tired and the max song capacity is 10,000 (to do with indexing not storage space – which is independent).

I have recently been thinking about other upgrade options and was wondering if there was an Audiophile DAR out there. Here is a link to fairly comprehensive list of all DAR’s currently available on the market. Has anyone else had specific experience with any of these.
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/kb13/mp3/
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btw, good job on your system, it looks great. I'm waiting for a backordered slimdevices.com squeezebox wireless network music player with analog and s/pdif outputs. It looks like a winner for mp3's and internet radio, I'm also curious to test wav and flac files through a msb gold dac+gaincard vs my cd player.
The squeezebox is excellent. I highly recommend it. Wired lan connection sounds better than wifi. Interposing a jensen transformer improves it more. I use it with fllu wav files but using flac lossless compression. Am yet to try a worthy dac on it.