Phil without going into details. We all know there are many roads to the « beloved » sound. I wanted to share this alternative with the community. I strongly believe that a real comparative opinion has to be sought from another source than a device dedicated forum. So I did. I got only few (deception) valuable opinions, one of them is this post from Alan Jordan, who actually owns a Duet:
“I have a Squeezebox Duet. I have directly compared its digital output with a PC output going to a MHDT Labs Havana DAC. When using the PC to the DAC, I tried coax via an M-Audio Delta 410 PCI, coax via a Lynx 2B, and USB directly to the Havana. The Squeezebox Duet driving the Havana did not have any digital glare, but comparatively was soft in the bass with a lack of dynamics. I thought the PC driving the Havana sounded much better. Note that the Havana is a filterless NOS DAC, so it does not have any jitter reduction technology and hence shows differences in transports quite clearly. I tried many different software players in this comparison, and three different PCs. The software players included CPlay, Squeezeslave (which allows a PC to act as a Squeezebox device), Foobar, J River Media Center, and Wavelab. In all cases, I thought the PCs sounded better than the Duet. I thought an optimized PC using CPlay, Squeezeslave sounded best. I never tested using a full CMP build when using CPlay, but did test using a similarly optimized Linux system when using Squeezeslave. >From my testing, I imagine a fully optimized CMP / Cplay solution would sound far better than any Squeezebox. Wavelab actually sounds very good too, but it is not a usable playback solution. I also did the same comparison of the Squeezebox Duet and PC into a Benchmark DAC1. The differences between the two, while detectable, were not as noticeable when feeding the Benchmark - probably due to its asynchronous upsampling. However, the Benchmark does not sound very good in my main system so I didn't spend very much time comparing the two. The Duet and Benchmark are still in use in my bedroom system, where I am not as obsessed with getting the best sound I can, and they suit their purpose well there. “ If I compare the SB or Transporter to the their solution , I see that they produce the same SPDIF output and obtain a very low jitter. The use of TCP/IP is not relevent. They use the PC bus for the same task , I mean the link from software player to the SPDIF chip. The main difference is the DAC in the Transporter. If someone likes his DAC then he is done for less money than the PC solution with external DAC, but as we know not everyboby likes this DAC. The SB + Dac is cheaper. That was the object of the thread. The PC solution is also atractive to the DIY inclined ;-) I’m very reluctant to eliminate any solution just on some theoretical considerations ex noisy PC and so one. As usual the only way would be to compare both solutions in the same system.... YMMV -- krzys ------------------------------------------------------------------------ krzys's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2256 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=65422
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