I feel the Duet system, when working properly, is a fantastic interface into my music library. The SB Receiver is a phenomenal little performer and an unbelievable value at $149. I will say right now that I think it sounds better than the SB3, through both the analog and digital outputs. That may be because of a different circuit layout, the lack of a VFD display, changes to the power supply, the Wolfson DAC (in the case of the analog sound), or some other factor. Or I may simply be insane, which is always a distinct possibility.
The SB Controller is also impressive. The resolution of the screen is excellent - album covers look great and menu text is very legible. I like how the cover of the new song snaps into place as you switch tracks. The wi-fi reception seems to work pretty well, considering my house has inside walls of plaster, brick, and/or concrete block. Complaints about the SBC? The battery seems to drain pretty quickly - of course, I'm also using it extensively to experiment and audition. In normal use it should do better, but it seems prudent to dump it in the charger every so often. If I was throwing a party and letting people pick tracks via the controller, I would want to have another SBC charging in another room to use when the first one goes drain-o. Also, the scroll wheel on the SBC isn't very smooth or very pleasing to work with. It's usable, but too rough. I understand a later SBC hardware version has an improved wheel, correct? I hope so. Also, the SBC seems to get hung when I take it out of the charger. The Now Playing screen doesn't want to change. Switching the SBC off & on fixes this, but the issue needs to be addressed. Maybe I should power it off before putting in the charger... SqueezeCenter7 - it's a really nice interface. Very slick. It doesn't run worth a damn on my 5-year-old Windows PC, though (P4 2.26 GHz with 1GB RAM). Too often SC7 and Firefox are locked in a deadly battle for CPU cycles. This results in actual interruption of the music. If I kill the webUI and just use the Controller, everything's fine. Better bump up the horsepower requirements for SC7. I'm sure SC7 will run much faster on my Linux server. Things seem to slow down when one PC has to do both the perl/database end and the html rendering. But my desktop PC is not really a proper test environment, since it is old and I rely on it for so much else. At this time, I'm not willing to use SC7b on my production server. The previous time I tried 7.x on the server I was unable to roll it back to 6.x and actually had to wipe the drive. Congrats on the SB Receiver! I think discriminating listeners will be very happy with the sound quality of this unit. The SB Controller is quite good but still needs a few tweaks. The SC7/Duet system is gonna be a winner. -- Pale Blue Ego ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pale Blue Ego's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=110 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=42570 _______________________________________________ jive mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/jive
