Squeze Box Question

I've got to say we are loving the squeezebox.. it, with a DAC, sounds as good as either of our CD players and the "fun" factor is right up there. Add the internet radio for learning about new genres of music and it's downright hard to leave the listening chair!

Grab the remote and access each song from a multitude of artists as you think of them, one leads to another and another and another...bored with that, access the internet radio systems and listen to something you've never heard before at pretty good quality, not as great as the cd but good enough to know if you want to purchase it....Sunday I went from my own favourites to String quartets, jazz fusion, alternate country and back again.....really puts the fun of discovery back into the music.

Am getting tired of ripping those cd's though...almost done - ripping to apple lossless with error correction this time!

Get one, hook up a DAC, and enjoy!

I have a Roku Soundbridge, which is similar to Squueze Box and an external DAC. I currently have about 3800 tracks in multiple genres ripped to my laptop as a wireless music server.

The sound is very good but the most enjoyable feature is to put the Roku in random track play mode and let it queue up the tunes like a jukebox. Its a great way to listen to tunes in a different way and to learn to appreciate tracks that might get overlooked otherwise.

Roku also provides a web site and the Roku a web page that can be accessed by browser to select playlists, adjust volume, skip tracks, etc from a laptop anywhere in the house.

Its just a totally different way to listen to music that also happens to sound excellent.

HIGHLY recommend you use .aiff and not apple lossless, by the way.

I would say let's slow down on saying a hard drive equals or exceeds the world's best transports. I just took the plunge into PC audio and am having trouble equaling the performance of my 15 year old $100 DVD player as a transport into my high end DAC. Now I am doing it all, ripping with EAC to wav, using Media Monkey with the right plug ins, using a high end RME sound card, ASIO drivers you name it. But right now I would give the edge to the old crappy DVD player. I will say I have some tweaks to do to my PC setup, so I won't say it is fully optimized, but right now PC audio is NOT delivering 100% of an old fashioned transport. We are about 95% of the way there, maybe with my final tweaks we can get 100-110% like people claim.

Three things must happen well for good sound regardless of technology:

1. Read all the bits correctly (source/transport)
2. clock them so they get converted to analog at the right time (clock, usually on transport but sometimes on DAC, particularly DACs that upsample)
3. convert them to analog (DAC)

Using a computer as a source can provide very good results usually for 1 but 2. can be rocky depending. 3. seldom ever takes place on the computer TTBOMK.

With a Squeezebox or Roku or similar network player, 1 occurs on the server, 2 is performed by the network player and 3 by either the internal or an external DAC, depending. Then some DACs may also upsample and re-clock as well.