sgmlaw wrote: > Its all opinion. But we at my house are now up to over a dozen SB > clients, and I have had extended intimate listening and underhood time > with all the major players for well over a decade now: SB3, Touch, > Receiver, and TP. While I remain fully committed to the ecosystem, I am > not a blind fanboy, and am willing to point out the flaws as well. > > The Slimserver/LMS architecture is still the best in my book. It can > handle most file formats, has great Internet radio support, and does a > better overall job than Roon, iTunes or any of the others. Community > support and iPeng has kept it current. It has a broad compatibilty with > clients of all kinds. And the formats and sampling rates it does not > support in my opinion are not meaningfully superior sounding. 96/24 > audio resolution is already better than most systems can fully > reproduce. By todays computing standards it is a very light resource > footprint, and most of the remaining issues with it are client > networking ones. Most machines can host it. It is close to a universal > audio streaming app. And its free. Keep it and its clients in a > modern ethernet environment, and it is fast and trouble free 99% of the > time. > > The SB3 is a fair digital front end and an ok player. It was hampered > by a cheap and very dirty power supply. It takes a lot of digital > reprocessing/reclocking to make it sound good as a digital head end, but > it is doable. It is fine for a casual or bedroom system. But the Touch > and TP are clearly better machines. > > The Touch is a very good digital head end and a decent player. Its > receiver, filtering and conversion sections are good, but its output > stage is definitely midfi caliber. As in harmonically thin and tonally > unnuanced. At the price point, they did all they could. But as a > digital head end feeding a better dac with a good output stage it is > still a good option for many systems. Throw on the digital pass-through > app, and you can play 192khz media through one. Still not bad for a > decade old product. And it still presents a pretty face. Just picked > up a clean spare one for $70 last month. > > The TP is an outstanding digital head end and converter section, even by > todays standards. That is where its designers spent the budget. And > that is why it was such a measurement champ with the audio rags. Its > failing is a mediocre (but not bad) analog output stage. Just not up to > snuff with the big boys. The analog stage is where the big bucks go in > better audio equipment. High quality output stages are expensive. And > that is why you can now pick up OEM TPs for under $400. It is overall > still a very good player. But as the digital head end to a really > first-class DAC with a serious output stage, the TP is as good as > anything out there even today. It is capped at 96/24 and stumbles on > some FLAC codings. But as I said, the differences going to higher > sampling rates or to DSD are not all that meaningful. I have one > feeding a fairly expensive two-chassis DAC in what could be termed a > high end system. And the TP in that role has yet to be unseated by a > series of more recent higher end clients in repeated auditions. It is > still that good. > > Thats my opinion and YMMV.
Now, you got me change my direction, maybe????:) Is the Transporter noticeably better than the SBT? I mean both while being used with an external DAC, as a digital transport ONLY. The only thing is lacking USB which is not a huge deal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ celo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=64476 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=110060
_______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
