Mark.Bennett Wrote: > On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 23:00 +0100, Daniel Cohen wrote: > > On 16/8/05 at 22:06 +0100, Mark Bennett wrote > > > > Possibly hi-fi dealers don't like the Squeezebox, and maybe they > > haven't tried SB2. Or perhaps the features that make us really like > > SB don't seem of interest to them. > > I think there is an element of truth in this. I took my > laptop/SB2/Benchmark Dac-1 into a couple of hi-fi shops at the > beginning of the year to audition new amps/speakers. > > One shop was very dismissive of the technology, saying that it > could never sound as good as a real CD player. The other shop > was more ambivalent and were vaguely interested in how it > performed. > > Perhaps the real issue here is that the SB2 doesn't appeal to > hi-fi shops. It doesn't look like the rest of their products, > there's not enough margin to make it worth their while and > there's probably too much risk of a novice needing far too > much support to get a system working. > > -- > "The biggest problem encountered while trying to design a system that > was completely foolproof, was, that people tended to underestimate the > > ingenuity of complete fools." (Douglas Adams) Indeed. One wonders how the SB2 would be received if it was put into a fancy minimalist but bulky high end housing, increased in price by an order of magnitude, and some key designer from Krell/Naim/Linn/Meridian or similar taken onto Slim Devices staff just so they could spin an audiophile message to the shops and mags. Audiophile shops rubbishing the concept is ridiculous, people like Linn and Meridian already offer equipment that in principle is the same as SB2 (Meridian make a big point of jitter reduction by taking the bitstream out of a big solid state buffer and Linn sell an HD player). Slim Devices just quietly delivery this stuff at a fair price and, since their entire company is built around this one concept, they have really thought hard about the protocols and the UI. I do have reasonably high-end audio, I'm sitting in front of over $10,000 of Meridian equipment as I type this, but I am very excited about swapping my CD transport for a SB2.
- Julian -- JulianL _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
