This thread is in danger of leading the casual reader to completely the wrong conclusion. I perceive a number of people here now think that a preamp is always required.
Sean comments that connecting directly to a power amp is an extremely bad idea. He then goes on to qualify the statement by mentioning passive attenuation as a solution, but I fear many might just read the first sentence and come away with the wrong idea. The way I see it is this. Provided you use appropriate passive attenuation to set up the gain staging correctly, it is perfectly sensible to connect a Squeezebox or Transporter directly to a power amp. One thing is for sure: any inexpensive active preamp (and the vast majority of expensive ones, too) will degrade the signal far more than the slight loss of S/N ratio you suffer when using the SB's digital volume control. As for the danger of a software fault blasting your speakers with full scale white noise: again, if you've set up the gain staging correctly, you should be OK, although I will acknowledge that the tweeters could be in peril. But the danger of this full scale white noise appears to be exaggerated. I have been running an SB2 for 3 years and a Transporter for 18 months, and have never once experienced this problem. -- cliveb Transporter -> ATC SCM100A ------------------------------------------------------------------------ cliveb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=348 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=47520 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
