The Transporter is as much a company statement as it is a product. It says "we're serious, here's what our design philosophy can really achieve". It's a sounding board, a developmental area to try out some advanced concepts (super regulators, a top-end DAC, word clock input, balanced design, etc).
Don't laugh at this comparison, but why would Volkswagen go all out and build the Bugatti Veyron? For the same reasons - to show the world just what it can do, bar the cost. OK, so there is some cost restraint to the Transporter as compared to the very very high end media players now, but not compared to the Squeezebox series at least. It very much appears that the Squeezebox design is mature and that new products have all been based on the Squeezebox design with few core changes. There's been no change to the CPU, buffer components, networking card or CPLD between the SB2, SB3, Duet, Transporter (OK a higher binned CPU) and Boom. I believe that Logitech is first going after the low-hanging fruit and capitalizing on the Squeezebox concept since the "Squeezebox guts" remain relatively unchanged. The Duet is an attempt to bring the display in the palm of your hand - the SBR is very much like the SB3, only the SBC is a radical departure. Boom is even more like the SB3 than the Duet in that it brings back the good old VFD display (may it live long!) Seeing what products have been developed since the Logitech acquisition, I believe we may see a few more ideas based on SB2 hardware that are relatively easy to develop and bring to market without a complete redesign of the SB2 hardware. However in the future that may change - how many more products can be based off the same hardware? People seem to be clamouring for handheld players now, I can't see how that can be served by the SB2 concept... It's looking less likely that we'll see an "SB4" as the product line has branched out rather than simply evolved a replacement. -- Mark Lanctot "Make it so it doesn't suck" is a good design target, but hard to implement - Michael Herger ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=52983 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
