Well, thank you very much for all the thoughtful responses youve provided. Several more comments/answers and some thinking out loud:
1) thanks for the reminder about Logitechs 30-day return policy. I just checked Audio Advisor and they have the same offer. I suppose I could order both a Touch and a DAC and run listening tests (and return the loser). Somehow that seems wrong to me and I would feel uncomfortable doing that. Besides Id probably end up keeping both! 2) more on my CD player as with all my equipment purchases, I purchased the best I could afford (for value received) as I went along. I own a Sony CDP-X77ES player which I purchased for $1498 in 1990. It was one of the top rated players at that time. It does have optional digital outputs (coax and optical) and obviously an onboard DAC. Sony referred to this DAC as a high density converter. 3) I have ripped all of my CDs (600+) to my hard drive (backing up frequently). All are FLAC. This was a huge undertaking since these are all classical music and, as has been discussed elsewhere on these forums, ripping this genre takes a great deal of handholding and is very labor intensive. Before undertaking this workload (of ripping to my hard drive) I did a careful A-B listening comparison. I compared playback of various CDs played on the Sony and the same tracks (in FLAC files) played through the Squeezebox. I did this for about 10 works. On some tracks I could hear no difference. On some, I could hear a small difference (with the music played through the Sony sounding better better soundstage, smoother, better fidelity, etc.). This was a tradeoff I was willing to make for the wonderful convenience of the Squeezebox system. 4) ralphpnj, you asked about not using the CD player. For CDs I own, youre right I never use the player. However, I do use it on a regular basis for one important situation listening to classical music CDs borrowed from public libraries. We live in a rural area with a small library but are blessed with an excellent inter-library loan system. Borrowing CDs has really been important to me lately. 5) I am now considering an additional outlay (Touch or DAC) for two reasons. First, I have read more and more about improved sound quality via ever-improving digital-to-analog conversion technology. Second, I have noticed something odd recently. During the last few years I have become more and more interested (and appreciative of) legacy recordings and artists from the 60s and 70s. Of course these recordings were originally analog and later converted to digital for releasing as CDs. Some have been re-mastered and re-released, some have not. I recently discovered that on these discs the A-B comparison on my system has been much more dramatic the music played through my Sony player sounds obviously better. If the sound quality improvement is so substantial using a twenty year old DAC chip, what miracles might be occur with the newest technologies? (BTW, I do not understand how a DAC can seem to dramatically improve the sound quality of some CDs, have minimal impact on others and none on still others.) Thanks again for your help and sorry this has turned out to be a novel. Dave -- MBlue72 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MBlue72's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13779 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067
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