squeezebox set up for audiophiles

sphardy wrote:
dhinesh wrote: Personally I'd recommend you just enjoy what you already have and not waste your time further trying to make the Touch "STRONG"

Guess theres no point in trying to put square pegs into round holes. :D Seems like nothing is going to make a difference. Will post back when I get the linear power supply.

In the meantime, let me share something with you. Put a 10 db and a 6db attenuator produced by mini circuits in the digital line and sound improved quite a bit. Connection: Squeezebox digital out into a 10db attenuator and then into a 6db attenuator and then into the dac, noise level dropped considerably. check out the low down on this: http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital- ... ucers.html

tried it and fell in love with the improvement. Things like this keep driving me to look for the perfect set up. But have not got there yet. But if its a futile cause, better save up for a high end product like the weiss 2002........ :? and hope it sounds better

Hickup wrote:
Even the Kimber PK 10 you considered alone is more expensive than the Touch. Changing anything on server side is a waste of money in your case, especially power cords, etc.

Great advice. tks! Have a spare PK10 lying around. As an old time audiophile, we always end up with quite a bit of audio junk in the attic! Worst part is I rarely sell stuff as someday I may use it again. Have not connected it to the NAS as yet as was waiting get inputs: posted the same question on logitec forum, infrant and diy audio. got good responses on all forums and have a better idea about what I am dealing with.

However, I would strongly suggest you try this: http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital- ... ers-2.html

Fell in love with the sound, much quieter. Things like this make me wonder: are bits really only bits? or is there a GHOST IN THE MACHINE? :D

Have more experience on the analogue side and still learning the digital side as rightly mentioned by sphardy

let me know if you get to try the attenuators

In the meantime, let me share something with you. Put a 10 db and a 6db attenuator produced by mini circuits in the digital line and sound improved quite a bit.

As a electronic engineer with 20+ years experience in digital design and digital communication systems I find this extremely difficult to believe - sorry *impossible* to believe - unless the Touch or your DAC are an extremely badly designed product.

confusing isn't it! :roll:

Read through the whole thread on diy audio forum and came out more confused than when I went in. :(

A friend actually ordered some immediately. Borrowed them from him and believe me the sound improved. Don't ask me how or what as I am not going to pretend that I am technologically adept or understand half the technical stuff they are talking about

But I know what I heard. The sound is better with an attenuator on both ends. IF I put two 10 db attenuators, the DAC does not lock on to the signal. 10Db and 6Db worked out fine. 10Db on its own did not sound as good as 10db on one end and 6db on the other end. Sound was a lot more focused with the attenuators

Try them out, its USD 12 a piece + shipping.

Well my friend, hope one day all this will become more clear. For the time being, lets share our experiences with the hope that in the end we will all have better systems :D

It is not confusing at all as I simply do not accept that such attenuation will improve the signal.

Think about it - the digital data stream consists of 0's and 1's, not an audio or analog signal and so no "noise" to reduce as you claim. Any changes implemented in the cable means you are changing the data, surely the complete opposite of what any audiophile would want?

The only circumstance where there is a remote chance a signal could be improved in this manner is if there is a fundamental mismatch in termination between source and destination causing the receiver to incorrectly interpret the input signal, and that would happen only if one or the other were badly designed in the first place. Given you and any others who implement such a modification will be using different equipment, what do you think the chances are that all those who claim to hear a difference happen to have some badly design equipment?

Also note that the thread you referred to consists of 92 pages of comments, by the end of which the original poster had resigned from the thread as he was unable to provide any verifiable proof to a community of engineers that his assertions were correct despite multiple proposals of how he could do exactly that.

So no - not confusing at all

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

sphardy wrote:
Also note that the thread you referred to consists of 92 pages of comments, by the end of which the original poster had resigned from the thread as he was unable to provide any verifiable proof to a community of engineers that his assertions were correct despite multiple proposals of how he could do exactly that. So no - not confusing at all

John Kenny is well known for his product: the modified hiface: http://sites.google.com/site/hifacemods/

He modified the original hiface: http://www.m2tech.biz/

Owned the hiface for a while and then bought the modified hiface. Huge improvement on the original hiface. It is a pity his voice drowned in all those comments. We had a listening session last weekend with some very serious audiophiles in two different systems and in both systems the attenuators improved the focus. Can not explain why but there was a huge improvement.

You mentioned '0' and '1' are the same in a digital signal, this opens another can of worms. :D If they are the same why do we get different sound from different digital cables / coaxial / spdif cables.

Or why would a meicord ethernet or a denon ethernet cable matter if '0' and '1' stayed the same?

Interference does matter and what the attenuators are doing is attenuating the signal. The logic being that if you attenuate the whole signal, any noise in the signal will be attenuated even more as it is usually not as loud / prominent as the primary signal. So once these are attenuated, the primary signal will be relatively noise free. However, if you attenuate it too much the DAC can not lock onto the signal.

Sorry, am not an engineer and can not explain all this to you in technical terms. However, I know what my ears are hearing. Can not explain it in technical terms but who knows one day we will meet for a listening session and I can demonstrate the differences.

But I am very happy with all the discussions as I get to learn more :D and hopefully share my experience :D

Hickup wrote:

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. 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

Somebody loves Frankie :D Good ol 80's. Fond memories :D

Using my Mac book pro with the USB output via the modified hiface: http://sites.google.com/site/hifacemods/

Sound is good but can not have a big library

DAC 8 comes with some drivers that are installed on the mac as well. The reason I prefer the touch is the convenience of having a 2TB library available via the controller. Love xraid2 and all the other features of the NAS that will be difficult to duplicate on a PC for someone like me. Additionally, 2 TB of SSDs will cost quite a bit :D Thats why I am on a quest to get better sound from the touch. But if it seems like I am putting square pegs into round holes, will have to rethink the strategy.

NHT 3.3: These speakers are very good. Have had them for 15 years. In 1996, Corey Greenberg a reviewer for Stereophile said these were the best speakers. Tweeter technology has evolved over the years but these are no slouches. Was running them with a MC Cormack Dna 1 and it could not drive them, switched to the Levinsons and VOILA!

Don't let the age and the price fool you. There are other candidates: Kharma, Revel, etc but I love the sound of these speakers. Everything has changed over the years but not the speakers. Latest change: changed the ref3 to the ref5 preamp from audio research. These days speakers like these will cost you 10k and above if you factor in the current prices. In 1996, the aerial 10t (speaker of the year in that year for stereophile) and the NHT 3.3 costed around USD 4.5k. These days speakers in this league will set up back quite a bit. :D

Audiophile gear prices are going up everyday, unfortunately. As they said: death and inflation are the only two certainities :D

dhinesh wrote:
You mentioned '0' and '1' are the same in a digital signal, this opens another can of worms. :D If they are the same why do we get different sound from different digital cables / coaxial / spdif cables.

The Audiophile focus on cables when discussing digital communications is quite amusing. I shall try to explain some of the key reasons:

In digital communications such as ethernet, data is guaranteed to be transmitted "bit accurate". That is because as well as the data, checksums are transmitted with, and based on, the source data. The receiver then recalculates those checksums and if it does not match the checksum that has been received the receiver knows there has been an error.

In that scenario the receiver asks the source to resend the data - it does not proceed and use the erroneous data.

Via this checking and retransmitting on error, perfect data transmission is guaranteed - or if the error persists the erroneous data is discarded and you will hear this in sound equipment as 'skipping' and pausing. I'm sure you have experienced this when trying to stream over the internet - it's the same thing.

This is why it does not matter what the transmission path from NAS to Touch is because the data is guaranteed to be correct or absent. This is also why you will not hear any incremental improvement in sound quality by playing around with the NAS, ethernet cables or your networking equipment. If there is a problem in that area the audio result is very obvious - with the worst equipment and poorest hearing it will be noticable.

(Note: There are other aspects I haven't covered such as flow control, what to do if data is not received at all etc, but hopefully you get a sense of how digital systems are designed to always deliver data accurately)

This technique however relies on the ability of the receiver to request data to be resent. Unfortunately in audio peripherals such as DACs, this technique is not used. There is no reason it couldn't be, but it is perhaps more costly and certainly more complicated due to the requirement to configure the network link.

Audio equipment comes with the history of just being able to plug things together without needing to configure anything, and the move into digital domain reflects this with the introduction of the likes of SPDIF and more recently asynchronous USB.

To make these connections "simple", like their analogue forebears, retransmission of erroneous data is not supported. Instead techniques such as error correction are used such that the receiver can detect and automatically correct errors. It is still possible to get errors, but these *should* be corrected. Even if not, the audio consequence will be very dependant on the receiver. The data could be dropped, so introducing "skipping", or the receiver could interpolate (ie guess) what the data would have been, or just uses the erroneous data. But given the randomness of errors if either of the last 2 options are used, these would be very unlikely to impact a particular frequency band or aspect of the audio but rather would be different every time you listen.

For these implementations - if properly engineered & setup they just work and doing things like adding attentuators or using "high quality" expensive cables will make no difference, possibly quite the opposite as you saw when one of your changes resulted in no audio at all.

Or why would a meicord ethernet or a denon ethernet cable matter if '0' and '1' stayed the same?

Exactly - why bother with such expensive cables? (I hope you have realised by now that my inital post was not serious, but not as funny as the "Spreadsheet" post on the identical thread you started over on the logitech forum: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthrea ... 419&page=5)

Provided the cable used meets the prescribed specification, a $5 cable will perform no worse than a $500 cable and anyone who claims differently is quite honestly full o' $hit

Here's a link to that denon cable on amazon - now selling for $10,000 - read the comments, if only for humour...

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedic ... 976&sr=8-1

dhinesh wrote:
Using my Mac book pro with the USB output via the modified hiface: http://sites.google.com/site/hifacemods/

In that case you still miss the point of the DAC8. The HiFace is a USB to S/PDIF converter, so again, instead of being able to use the superior capabilities of the DAC8's handling of USB based input, you feed something inferior to it which cannot be handled well by that machine.

Connect your source via USB to this D/A converter and you will receive the maximum benefit it can offer. As it has its own master oscillator, there is absolutely no need to introduce another clock generator like the HiFace. Plus, I would be rather suspicious regarding the HiFace, it is being described as to transport the signal untouched, including no "re-clocking" and only one paragraph later, it offers "2 low jitter oscillators need for clocking out the audio SPDIF signal". Quite the contradiction. I am surprised you think the HiFace clock is superior to the master oscillator of the Audio Research, I believe you better get rid of it and use the DAC properly.

Regarding the cables, forget about all this voodoo crap which is discussed all over the Internet. I participated in some hearing sessions including blind tests and everyone just fails to tell a difference in between various digital cables (and devices of a similar nature). And all of the serious double blind tests even left the manufacturers searching for explanations why they failed to identify their own superior technology. I believe that all analogous connections should be carefully selected so that there is no signal degradation (and invested quite some effort into it, in the end even tailoring my own cables - no acceptable pre-made one available for my Bi-Amping Setup), but other than this, I feel absolutely relaxed about my cables. If you believe to have witnessed an audible difference, then this is only due to someone telling you enthusiastically about the big change in quality just before of the demonstration - the mind can play rather nasty tricks in that aspect. No serious challenge whatsoever was ever won by the voodoo fetishists.

dhinesh wrote:

Sound is good but can not have a big library DAC 8 comes with some drivers that are installed on the mac as well. The reason I prefer the touch is the convenience of having a 2TB library available via the controller. Love xraid2 and all the other features of the NAS that will be difficult to duplicate on a PC for someone like me. Additionally, 2 TB of SSDs will cost quite a bit :D Thats why I am on a quest to get better sound from the touch. But if it seems like I am putting square pegs into round holes, will have to rethink the strategy.

The NAS is great, you are correct in that it should remain the storage place. In my previous posting I did not meant to store your music library on the SSD, only the OS and whatever else is necessary for the fanless computer so it gets completely quiet. It still needs a wireless connection to the NAS to access the music which is stored there. There are some software solutions like SqueezePlay which are available for Windows, Mac and Linux, so you can leave your NAS as it is today.

With such a setup, all the handling of the actual music is purely achieved on the Audio Research, the computer is just feeding the data it receives from the NAS and will do this equally good or bad as any other possible solution, no matter of price.

dhinesh wrote:

NHT 3.3: These speakers are very good. Have had them for 15 years. In 1996, Corey Greenberg a reviewer for Stereophile said these were the best speakers. Tweeter technology has evolved over the years but these are no slouches. Was running them with a MC Cormack Dna 1 and it could not drive them, switched to the Levinsons and VOILA! Don't let the age and the price fool you. There are other candidates: Kharma, Revel, etc but I love the sound of these speakers. Everything has changed over the years but not the speakers. Latest change: changed the ref3 to the ref5 preamp from audio research. These days speakers like these will cost you 10k and above if you factor in the current prices. In 1996, the aerial 10t (speaker of the year in that year for stereophile) and the NHT 3.3 costed around USD 4.5k. These days speakers in this league will set up back quite a bit. :D

Speaker like this go for well below 3k, this has been good technology, but still it is outdated today. The world did not stop in all those years. I believe we should not start discussion different brands of speakers, that would be too much off topic for the ReadyNAS forum - still I would judge your budget distribution a bit uneven.

Kind regards,
Frank