http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_transporter.html




"Streaming music player for the audiophile"

$2k though

No FM. I'll stick with my empeg for now.

Cheers

Although that photo does make me nostalgic for vu meters... <adjusts visual...> Ah...

Mmmm.. no recording, no drives either. It's basically just a very overpriced version of their $300 Slim gadget, to appeal to folks who also purchase gold power cords.

Cheers

It's an interesting gamble for them. I have one friend who is squarely in their market demographic. He's the sort of guy who's put more money into his home stereo than his car (and it's not a cheap car, either). He's gone through a variety of different D/A solutions, pre-amps, etc., all in search of that perfect sound. And, I have to admit, I can hear the subtle differences when he flipped back and forth. Anyway, I forget the brands, but he's presently using one decoder for Dolby Digital / DTS, and an entirely separate decode for two-channel stereo. Both were quite pricey.

To somebody like my audiophile friend, the question is whether he's already got a good-enough D/A, and thus only needs "good" bits to feed it (and, naturally, what the best source of good bits would be; the "clocking" issue seems to be a big deal for him). Also, he's recently been sucked into the world of vinyl (*sigh*), so it's hard to say where that's all going to lead him.

At $2000 it must have one hell of a sweet margin. [homer] Mmmmmmm... Margin [/homer]

Dan, I think you mean your friend has been "suckered" into vinyl. It's sounds crappy now, has always sounded crappy and will forever continue to sound crappy. To appreciate the sound of vinyl is simply to relive some past younger memories. Or to feel some sort of connection to your past, like going to a Civil War reenactment, Williamsburg, a Pioneer Village, etc...

Yes, but it's a warmer, tonally rich crappy.



-Zeke

Vinyl actually does sound pretty good if you've got:

- a multi-thousand dollar turntable with an exotic tone arm and cartridge
- a dedicated, equally exotic, phono-to-line-level amplifier
- albums that you carefully clean before you play them

At that point, it sounds as good as a good CD. Realistically, the place where vinyl still occasionaly wins is that early CD remasterings were just awful. More modern CD remasterings (particularly of my favorite jazz cuts from the 1950's) are absolutely brilliant. If you're getting a remastering done before they'd figured out how to do it properly, you'd probably prefer the vinyl version.

(On the modern high-tech end, my friend has hybrid ribbon speakers with dedicated per-speaker class-D amplifiers, and all of his line-level signals go over XLR cabling. His main speakers go happily down to 20Hz, and then there's his subwoofer with its own parametric equalizer. It's all very impressive, if excessive.)

I wish they made one with with all the knobs and buttons and the same form factor, but without all the "audiophile" gimcrackery and sold it for much less. I like my Squeezebox quite a bit, but I'd like it better if it were 19" wide and had some front-panel controls.

And if the volume went to 11.

We had the volume level pretty closely matched. The differences, in this particular test, could be best described as "fatiguing". The all-purpose Dolby Digital/DTS/etc. decoder just didn't sound quite as "good" as the single-purpose two-channel DAC.

Personally, I'd never spend that kind of cash, but there are real, noticable differences between different components. Back when I bought my Arcam AVR300 receiver for driving my 5-channel setup, I compared it against a cheaper NAD receiver driving the center and rear channels with an off-board NAD (or was it Rotel?) two-channel amp driving the main speakers. The sound with the all-in-one Arcam was just better, particularly the bass. Was that due to the decoding software? The quality of the DACs? Power supplies? I have no idea, but there was a subtle difference, so I went with the cheaper / better solution.

My old record deck was not expensive, and my CD player in my hi-fi stack is - even so, vinyl ALWAYS sounds better than CD to me! I don't care how many tech companies tell me CDs have more precision than I can hear, I still know which sounds best.

But fitting a car record deck is £20,000 more expensive than I am willing to go:-)