Squeezebox touch - any good wirelessly??

[ossy]

Hi, am playing about with one of these with the idea of losing my cd player.

 

At the moment it is running wirelessly off an imac (in the kitchen), all the cd's are on apple lossless. The touch is streaming in the main system next door and is playing into an audiosector dac.

 

It sounds good, very good. However, it is not as good as my cd player and I was hoping it would be. It is pretty close but sounds a little more rounded and slightly flatter, less differentiation of instruments maybe and perhaps a little more digital (I can't explain better than that!)

 

The question is, am I expecting too much of a streaming device (it's too far away from the mac to hardwire it)?? I get the impression most people who use these are not streaming so is it unreasonable of me to expect it to at last match my cd player (it's a meridian btw).

 

Any advice, very much appreciated - i'm kinda new to computer based music!

 

 

 

[firedog]

I don't think the limiting factor is the wireless. You should be getting a high quality bit perfect digital signal from your iMac wirelessly to the Touch, unless there is some problem with the setup on the iMac/Squeezebox Server, or with your rips (doubtful).

 

Questions: Are you using optical or SPDIF into your DAC from the Touch? On some systems one sounds much better than the other. Switch and see if that improves the sound.

 

If your CD player sounds better than the Touch and the DAC, your CD player may simply be a superior piece of equipment. Have you used the CD player as a transport only and connected it to the DAC? If it doesn't sound as good that way as it does on it's own, then the external DAC may be the weak link when compared to the Meridian internal DAC. I'm not familiar with your DAC, and I don't know which model Meridian you have, but Meridian makes some very good CD players, so it may just be too good for the Touch/DAC combo.

 

Or, just temporarily, setup the Touch and the DAC wired to the iMac, and see if that makes a difference. I doubt it will.

 

 

 

[ossy]

Thanks for the response!

 

I use the cd player as a transport into the dac (the dac improved the cd player (it's an old meridian 206b and makes a great transport)). The dac is a nos dac and is a good one - it's made by a guy called peter daniels in canada.

 

Unfortunately the dac is SPDIF only (no optical) so no choice there.

 

I was hoping that effectively using the squeezebox as a streamed transport it would sound the same as the cdp (used as a transport). Why isn't this the case?

 

[bikemig]

I really like the sound of the SB Touch using the RCA outs and at this point I no longer have a CD player. That said, one's mileage varies and there are many on this list who prefer to feed it to a dac. It sounds like you might fall into that camp as well. This seems like the likely place for you to tweak your system. I might go that route one day if I get bit with the upgrade bug again . . .