Any info on sqeezebox slim devices?


It seems pretty simple to hookup. Go from PC to sqeezebox to preamp. You can go wireless or hookup via ethernet. One question I have is how is the sound quality? I would be ripping on to my hard drive using a lossless compression most likely Flac. Would the sound quality be equal to that of a high end CD Player, or equal to that of an IPOD, or somewhere in between. This seems a little better than the Sonis system being it lets you use your home stereo to listen to your music. It seems reasonably priced as well.
bodine
I rip my CD's using Windows Media Player 10. The ripping format is WMA lossless. I just insert the CD and let WMP rip away. I did buy a high quality CD drive and I set my rip speed to 2X. I played around with EAC and foobar but found them too much of a pain in the Butt. I compared rips from EAC and WMP and I was hard pressed to hear a difference. And, when I did hear a difference it would be very subtle. I guess this is where EAC's superior ripping was making its self known. Occasionally, WMP 10 has a problem ripping a certain track, so I clean the CD and re-rip. This has cured the problem every time so far. So, if you want the ultimate rip, then go with EAC. I am happy with giving up 2-3% for the ease of use of WMP 10. In addition, WMP 10 labels all the tracks for me. It’s very rare that I have to edit them. And, when you have 1000’s of CD’s, you can see where this becomes an issue.

As far as playing back classical or jazz CD's on the Squeezebox, there is no break in the music as long as you play the entire CD. Now, if you add a few tracks from a classical CD to a play list there will be a very slight gap between the tracks. I don't use play lists so I don't have a problem with this.

Why did I choose Bolder over Redwine? I spoke to both Wayne and Vinnie before making my decision. They both offer great mods and great customer service. And, they are both very knowledgeable and polite on the phone. It was a tough choice but the deciding factor was that the Redwine mod uses a battery supply. I have s sleep disorder that requires me to sleep with the TV or stereo on. I sleep 16-20 hours a day. So, this would mean about 2-3 battery changes a year on the Redwine mod. I just did not want to be bothered with battery changes.
Wow, Prpixel, sorry to hear about your condition. I can see where that would drive how you do certain things. I very much appreciate the detailed response. I've posted on AA as well, and it seems that in fact Slimserver should have no problem with FLAC tracks and gaps, as it were. So I'm not going to eat up a lot of time trying to get too geeky with this. I too have a killer CD drive (a Plextor Premium) set aside just for this job. With that, EAC, and 700 GB worth of storage I think I can finally start this thing.
With 700GB of storage you should be able to store about 2800-3000 CD's. Remember to backup occasionally. You don't want to loose all that time spent ripping.

Good luck and happy ripping,
As THEY say, money is not everything.

Some people consider a cheap NOS DAC like the DAC-Ah gives them the organic sound that beats many expensive DACs. Whatever that means.

You really have to survey the market and determine the optimal price/performance combo for yourself.

A hotly contested price point is $1k where you can find Benchmark DAC1, Apogee Mini-DAC, Lavry DA-10 and a whole bunch of other DACs in stock or modded form.