Good point... interestingly, most of the time spent in audio publications on the Sonos and Slim Devices competitors is related to the cool factor. I really would like to see a serious evaluation of the audio quality along the lines you suggest:
1) Very high caliber CD transport
2) Sonos ZP80
3) Squeezebox 3
all fed into a few very high class DACs. Then we could lay much of this "is the ZP80 a good transport" issue to rest, and focus on the cool factor without someone thinking that we're sacrificing quality for ease! This is the next generation of high end audio. Someone needs to write a manifesto...
And the next step is for the Sonos and Squeezebox to start accepting 24/96 flac streams (even if passed to DAC rather than decoded on board) so that we can actually go hi-rez without investing in more hardware to play new formats! But that's another story (and yes, I know Transporter can do it, but I do not want to add a Slim Devices device to my already very nice Sonos system).
J
PS Don't suppose anyone will ever build a truly high end LP machine that has the ease of the Sonos interface, will they? ;-)
1) Very high caliber CD transport
2) Sonos ZP80
3) Squeezebox 3
all fed into a few very high class DACs. Then we could lay much of this "is the ZP80 a good transport" issue to rest, and focus on the cool factor without someone thinking that we're sacrificing quality for ease! This is the next generation of high end audio. Someone needs to write a manifesto...
And the next step is for the Sonos and Squeezebox to start accepting 24/96 flac streams (even if passed to DAC rather than decoded on board) so that we can actually go hi-rez without investing in more hardware to play new formats! But that's another story (and yes, I know Transporter can do it, but I do not want to add a Slim Devices device to my already very nice Sonos system).
J
PS Don't suppose anyone will ever build a truly high end LP machine that has the ease of the Sonos interface, will they? ;-)