After 12 months of trial and error I am finally very happy with my setup for my large great room after many false starts. My setup is SB3 with full Bolder Cable analog mods (including the Platinum Sonicap and Ultimate Power Supply II) running over wired 100 MB Ethernet > Musical Fidelity Amp > Sonus Farber speakers. We tried all of the solutions listed below, but could not get a rich realistic sound until we trid SB3 with the mods. My ears bleed easily with harsh, digital, or flat (no harmonic vertones) sound because I am a classical musician. It is interesting that the SB3 plus mods cost less than Transporter but sound much much better. I am not a techy audiophile so I hope my descriptions are clear enough to be useful).
1/2006- Olive Musica - Sound is very thin tried with two different amp & speaker setups (rating 3 out of 10). Returned it. 9/2006 - Transporter - Loved Slimserver and functionality of Transporter, but the sound out of the analog outputs was dissapointing (rating 4 out of 10). Sound was particularly flat in the low and mid treble regions. Desirable harmonics (overtones) unique to each instrument were simply not present. String quartets music, for instance, sounded particularly thin and quack-quack-quacky. Additionally, the sound overall was not as full as I had expected. I talked with SlimDevices staff about it several times and had them test it to make sure that there was nothing defective about the particular unit I received. I returned it. 10/2006 - SB3 (kept the SB3 that came with Transporter) - Sounded thin and noisy out of the analog outputs (rating 2), but sounded much better than Transporter out the digital output into a California Audio Labs Alpha DAC (>Musical Fidelity amp > Sonus Farber speakers)(rating 6). After listening to this for a few weeks, I realized that the sound was a little less clear and less full than I wanted. Sent SB3 to Bolder Cable for mods described above. 12/2006 - Received the modded SB3 back. Tremendous improvement with modded analog outputs and Ultimate Power supply right out of the box even though the caps require many hours of break-in to acieve best sound (rating 8). Now, with about 200 hours of break-in it sounds even better (rating 9). This should continue to improve with more hours of break-in. Just for fun, I tried SB3 with the power supply provided instead of the Ultimate Power Supply. (rating 5 or 6). I then tried SB3 unmodded digital output into my DAC with the Ultimate Power Supply. (rating 8). The fully modded Analog output with Ultimate Power Supply sounds best now that it is partially broken in. I'm going to purchase a second modded SB3 for our bedroom when I can afford it. -- laurie ------------------------------------------------------------------------ laurie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7908 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31053 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
