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Forum Discussion
squeezebox set up for audiophiles
After researching a bit and reading up on the forum, I would like to set up my squeezebox touch as follows and any input, criticism, guidance, etc to help all of us get on the right path would help. I...
Sorry, but even though I probably spent more money on my hifi system than I can detect using my hearing (still love the design of my Transrotor Dark Star even though I will never be able to tell an audible difference of that machine to one half the price :lol: ), I feel fairly confident that my university study about physics taught me a thing or two... there is no ghost in the machine. Certainly not one who can superimpose "something" onto a digital signal which influences the sound. Plus, most topics can be explained in words understandable by a common human being, if someone "must" use language of a super complex level, usually something is very fishy. And after reading a couple of pages of the thread you linked to... well, I have no clue what those guys are talking about and I suspect that this is true for them as well.
I did some reading on the DAC you use - this seems to be a far better point when discussing potential for improvement. The Audio Research DAC8 is specialized in acting as a high res sound card for a computer connected via asynchronous HD USB coming with its own master oscillator. Basically this means you don't have to care about jitter in the signal you feed to this DAC any more if you use the USB connection. If you don't (and the Squeezebox can only be connected using S/PDIF) use it like this, you are missing the point with this machine. All streaming clients I know of which act as a waypoint in between a WiFi Signal and a DAC will use S/PDIF or something similar and do not provide the capabilities best for this setup, they all miss the USB connection capability.
And regarding the rest of your equipment, I would say there is an even larger candidate. The NHT 3.3 speakers you use are not even in the same league as the rest of your equipment, especially when compared to the Mark Levinsons. To me, speakers are the most critical part of any HiFi system, next in line is the amplifier. If you intend to spend around double or triple the amount of money in a streaming client when compared to your speakers, I would advise you switch budgets. Get yourself a fanless computer, equip it with enough SSD hard disk space for a completely quiet system, connect this to the Audio Research and you have your source. Then take the money you saved and buy a new set of speakers (assuming you talk about a budget beyond 10k).
Actually today my latest order arrived, feel free to google for "12 ZTAS 25" and "12 ZTAS 1"... I am off listening to all those immensely enjoyable non digital noises :D
Have fun,
Frank
I did some reading on the DAC you use - this seems to be a far better point when discussing potential for improvement. The Audio Research DAC8 is specialized in acting as a high res sound card for a computer connected via asynchronous HD USB coming with its own master oscillator. Basically this means you don't have to care about jitter in the signal you feed to this DAC any more if you use the USB connection. If you don't (and the Squeezebox can only be connected using S/PDIF) use it like this, you are missing the point with this machine. All streaming clients I know of which act as a waypoint in between a WiFi Signal and a DAC will use S/PDIF or something similar and do not provide the capabilities best for this setup, they all miss the USB connection capability.
And regarding the rest of your equipment, I would say there is an even larger candidate. The NHT 3.3 speakers you use are not even in the same league as the rest of your equipment, especially when compared to the Mark Levinsons. To me, speakers are the most critical part of any HiFi system, next in line is the amplifier. If you intend to spend around double or triple the amount of money in a streaming client when compared to your speakers, I would advise you switch budgets. Get yourself a fanless computer, equip it with enough SSD hard disk space for a completely quiet system, connect this to the Audio Research and you have your source. Then take the money you saved and buy a new set of speakers (assuming you talk about a budget beyond 10k).
Actually today my latest order arrived, feel free to google for "12 ZTAS 25" and "12 ZTAS 1"... I am off listening to all those immensely enjoyable non digital noises :D
Have fun,
Frank
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