I have six Squeezeboxes (3 Classics and 3 Booms), so I am a big a fan of Logitechs products. My only point is that most owners of a Squeezebox shouldnt feel left out of the party if they dont own a Touch just because of the new specs of 24/96 DACs because in the real world they wouldnt hear any difference.
Of course if you are in the market for a Squeezebox anyway (e.g. dont have any Squeezeboxes yet or want to expand to additional rooms), the Touch does look attractive. On the issue of DVD-A source material, even here one has to pause before gear lust overtakes reality. Here are some excerpts from a manufacturer of audio equipment on the issues of what you can actually hear from a DVD players digital outs due to copyright issues: many DVD transports currently on the market fail to transmit the exact digital audio data bit-for-bit as it appears on the DVD. Of the DVD transports Benchmark has tested (8 as of this writing), all of them modified high-resolution audio data before sending it to the digital output Transports modify the high-resolution data in order to comply with digital copyright obligations to the publishers and distributors of music and video discs. The music and film industries are trying to prevent bit-for-bit copying of the recordings. Consequently, manufacturers of DVD transports have been forced to reduce the resolution of digital outputs to prevent digital duplication. However, the sonic consequences of these modifications can be devastating to audio quality. We are able to measure sample rate, bit depth, and conversion quality with our Audio Precision test equipment. In almost all cases, the data modification includes poor quality sample-rate conversion (SRC) and word-length truncation. These processes defeat the benefits of high-sample-rate and/or high-bit-depth source material, and severely degrade sonic quality. Although the SRC and word-length reduction is being applied to reduce the quality of the digital output to CD resolution, it actually degrades the sound quality far beyond that of properly mastered CD resolution. In fact, these transports will deliver higher performance from a CD than from a high-resolution DVD. Unfortunately, the SRC processing in the transports tested was of poor quality. The distortion that results can be devastating to the quality of the playback system. Also, it is often re-sampled to 44.1 kHz, which inherently eliminates all the advantages of playing high-sample-rate audio discs. Most DVD transports reduce 24-bit digital recordings to 16 bits by truncating the 8 'least-significant-bits' (LSB's). In other words, these 8-bits are simply removed without dithering. This type of truncation adds quantization errors that result in significant levels of distortion. http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/discuss/feedback/newsletter/2009/07/1/your-transport-giving-you-all-bits Here are some excerpts from a manufacturer of audio equipment on the issues of bit depth and sample rate: 96kHz sampling also causes problems with the noise performance of low frequency EQ stages (because the differences between adjacent samples are smaller), so a 96 kHz system typically requires a longer wordlength to achieve the same noise performance as a 48 kHz one. Measurements which specify the dynamic range of the ADC or DAC in isolation should also be treated with caution, since these are often data sheet numbers supplied by the IC manufacturer which are rarely if ever achieved in practice. The ADC and DAC parts that we use are both "nominal 24-bit" items, but this is essentially meaningless. If a manufacturer claims that they have a "24-bit converter" in their product, then the next question to ask is how you should measure the unit to confirm the 144 dB dynamic range that this implies. In practice no-one is achieving even 20-bit noise performance (=120 dB dynamic range) from a digital system of this kind at the present time. The DN9848 achieves >114 dB dynamic range or "19 bits" overall from input to output. Note that this is an unweighted figure (i.e. flat frequency response). Some manufacturers quote "A-weighted" figures which flatter the unit's performance significantly by applying a psycho-acoustic curve to the measurement. Measurements which specify the dynamic range of the ADC or DAC in isolation should also be treated with caution, since these are often data sheet numbers supplied by the IC manufacturer which are rarely if ever achieved in practice. In the end, the one-sentence summary is "don't worry too much about the bits and sample rates - trust the same real-world performance measurements of noise and distortion that you would apply to analogue". And after that, there are always your ears... http://www.klarkteknik.com/faq-04.php Finally, a recent study published in the journal of the Audio Engineering Society concluded that not a single listener could consistently distinguish between high-resolution audio and audio played at the CD standard. http://www.aes.org/journal/online/comment/?ID=14195 -- mortslim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mortslim's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=11039 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=67679
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