garym;603748 Wrote: > A lot of these comparisons are somewhat theoretical. At my age with the > hearing loss at certain frequencies, I doubt I'd be able to choose in a > blind test whether I'm listening to a duet, TOUCH, or my Transporter. I > ran a DUET receiver feeding via S/PIDF a Benchmark DAC I and it sounded > very, very good (better than some very good CD transports I had access > to). I now use the TRANSPORTER in my main system and have a few TOUCH > units as well for other places. But for me it is not truly because I > found the duet lacking. We all like to think we are getting the most > from our systems (thus my use of the transporter instead of the duet > receiver or SB3), but real world issues with our systems (speakers, > placement, room setup, etc.) and our own physical limitations are > critically important. So if the Duet really works well for you and > you're not using many tracks other than CD redbook 16/44.1 then you > shouldn't rule it out. There are real differences I'm sure, and many > have measured them (so this is not "place a rock on top your speaker > and paint your CD rim black), but this is also not typically "oh my > god" audio differences. Again, I'm starting my discussion assuming > you're not 16 years old and thus have naturally better hearing > potential than me.
Just to be clear, I've upgraded from Duet to Touch only and exclusively because I wanted to be able to play my growing collection of high definition music (96 kHz FLACs). I wasn't expecting ANY sonic improvements when playing back the regular 16 bit/44 kHz material. As a matter of fact, I was so uneducated at that point that I was firmly convinced that there couldn't be any theoretical possibility that one digital transport could differ from another one (save for the sampling rate). Needless to say, I was in for a big shock the very moment I've plugged my newly acquired Touch into my Beresford Caiman DAC. The difference in the quality of Touch's digital transport is of the "oh my god!" type. Significantly lowered noise, significantly lowered jitter. Switching back to Duet, the sound tends to degrade to the point where it makes me cringe. It's much grainier than through the Touch. Especially now with a modded Touch, the differences between Duet and Touch are easily detectable. You cannot modify Duet because it is not founded upon Linux OS. Duet appears to be built on some proprietary OS, while Touch is based on an open source OS. Huge difference in terms what you can do with the product, especially if you know a tiny little bit about Linux. -- magiccarpetride ------------------------------------------------------------------------ magiccarpetride's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37863 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=84903 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
