O dear. Such passion. I ask the question in a fairly disinterested sort of way. It is surely worth asking.
For my part I like my SB3 very much and listen to it all the time. With an external DAC it betters my Quad FM tuner and streamed FLAC betters my Quad 77 CD Player. I listen mostly to hi bit classical music radio streams, and to BBC Radio 4. I do not object to the price I paid for my SB3, and yes, I have had my money's worth. I simply observe that a small cheap PC will do more for less. Others have observed there are other hardware solutions to music streaming, and very soon media streaming boxes that handle video as well as audio formats will be cheaper than an SB3. It may be that they will not manage audio as elegantly or as well. The SB3 internal DAC is better than some, but not good enough for me; but I appreciate the difference in production cost between including it or not will be very small. Half a duet would do me as I hardly ever look at the SB3 screen, and I usually tap the keys of the laptop on the coffee table in front of me rather than try and find the remote. I bought the SB3 after quite a lot of personal research. I bought it to sidestep the re-sampling/bit-perfect issues of Windows hardware; I bought it because it was a silent box; and I bought it because of the (mostly) open source software that I could see would develop in response to a myriad of different needs. Was it worth the cost to me? Most certainly, yes. Does it still cost too much? Probably, looking at what other boxes do and contain. And yet the quality of construction is far better than many cheap boxes. Let the discussion continue. -- Labarum Brian Squeezebox 3 Classic and Virgin Cable Box Beresford DAC TC-7510 MK6/4 - Quad 405-2 refurbished by 405man Quart 980s Speakers Boom in kitchen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Labarum's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=19963 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=64207 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
