On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 21:48 -0700, WSLam wrote: > - No Internal DAC. Save the cost, and spend it on elsewhere > Anyone else?
I am not an IC engineer, but I can't imagine that leaving out the internal DAC would save any money at all. Instead, I would bet a beer that it would net out to costing more. In ancient postings, one of the Slim engineers said that the display was the largest cost part of the SB1. If they just left out the part, it would save at most the price of the DAC chip. Since the whole thing sells for under $300 and the wired version for under $250, it is hard to imagine that the DAC itself costs more than $20. They would then have to have two products, two sets of packaging, separate QA procedures, etc. They would accidentally ship some normal products to audiophile customers, and some audiophile products to normal customers, and the labor to straighten it out would destroy any savings. It they designed a special model, without the DAC support circuits, they would have two more radically different products, with _all_ of the same problems listed above. Set the volume on wide open and ignore it. AES connections over XLR would be cool, but from a practical matter, the cable lengths are way too short to care. It is hard to imagine that an audiophile would have the squeezebox more than a meter away from the preamp/amp. At those distances, cables are snakeoil. Put a brick on top to keep it from moving. Or better yet, I'll get a huge aluminum heatsink and sell it as a critical cooler and weight to keep it from moving. A more serious remote would help the marketing for audiophiles, but I'm not at all sure that there are enough audiophiles that are computer literate enough to be a market. You can always just buy a Harmony remote. BTW, my Classe integrated amp has a wonderful remote. Feels machined out of a billet of metal. Very cool. But, no one has the IR codes for Classe stuff, so I have to get a learning remote to be able to reduce my collection of remotes. There probably is a market for taking the Harmony remote and wrapping it in $20 worth of metal and selling it for $500 :-) Pat -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
