How would you improve the sound of Squeezebox?

To Wireless200,
It is much to my surprise that the SB is 85% of the Apollo in terms of SQ. I was considering getting the Apollo as well, thinking it would be a big improvement over the SB. But now guess I shouldn't get my expectations too high... Also to my surprise is the Transporter is inferior than the Apollo in your case, considering it is double the price of the Apollo. But I will see when I get mine.

To Cerrot,
I do think the peripherals for your SB have something to do with its SQ. In fact, this is exactly the reason why I posted this thread - to add the right peripherals to the SB in order to maximize the SQ of a SB as much as possible.

To Cruz123,
I just looked at Bolder Cable's website, and their mods do not really attack the jitter issues, as they do nothing with clocking/reclocking. But I think the digital mod still looks worthwhile. I looked at Empirical Audio's website as well, while they don't currently have any mods for SB, they do have the Pace-Car to reclock signals out of SB, not exactly cheap though. How about Bold Cable's Digital Mod + E.A. Pace-Car? would be a big step up from the stock SB digital output. What do you guys think? or is anyone already doing this?

The Pace-Car is certainly interesting, but seems like it could be overkill given the price point. You may want to try a Monarchy DIP 48/96 upsampler as a lower cost alternative. See http://www.monarchyaudio.com/. Your post reminded me that I have one of these in storage. I'll pull it out and see if I can notice any improvement.

Amaggie05 wrote:
"How about Bolder Cable's Digital Mod + E.A. Pace-Car?"

Modding the SB3 would be a waste of good money if it's feeding a Pace-Car. The jitter coming into the Pace-Car is not really important. The clock is replaced with a local free-running clock inside the Pace-Car. If the Pace-Car is fed with SB3, Apple TV, AirPort Express or Sonos, they all sound identical, modded or unmodded.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

I have a Monarchy upsampler on my PC Rig (going into a Musical Fidelity XDAC V3 (w/XPSU V3 power supply); I tried the Monarchy on the Squeezebox and no improvement-infact, I think it narrowed my soundstage just a tad but could be just perception (add a cable, etc). SB goes into a benchmark DAC1 and I have read that the Benchmark's technology omits need of an upsampler. I should go back and try it with a better digital cable, power cord but I'm maxed out of cables right now (I used a signal power cable and a monster 75ohm digital cable).

Cerrot,

How does the SB sound with its digital output feeding into the benchmark? how does it compare with using the RCA outputs from its own DAC?