radish Wrote: > Because cost is an indication of quality? Please. > > > Based on what? The fact that it costs money? The fact that it comes in > a shiny box? This is an absurd argument. If you have a device which > claims to use FLAC and which sounds different when playing them back > versus the original CD it's BROKEN. I don't care how many millions of > dollars it cost. > > Personally I don't trust sealed black boxes unless I can verify they > are working properly by my own experimentation. I trust a binary diff > more than my ears and hugely more than some ripoff manufacturer's > marketing department.
Now, now. You left out the part of my original post where I stated "Let me play Devil's Advocate". I too suspect that there was a problem with the McIntosh - since a 300 Gb Maxtor hard drive shouldn't produce any "dropouts" reading at 140 Kb/sec - those drives are capable of read speeds of 40-50 megabytes/sec or better. I should inquire about it with Ron Cornelius at McIntosh to see if he knows any of the background- it was possibly a demo unit that had "made the rounds" so to speak. We auditioned an MS300 at the Mac factory this summer - it's a wonderful unit - it's meant to be integrated with a Home Theatre setup - the user interface on a widescreen TV is beautiful. And the CD identification didn't have much trouble with providing proper cover art or album information. Some CDs just aren't in those online databases. The SB3 basically does many of the same things that the McIntosh does - as long as the user is willing to understand and employ software technologies like EAC, FLAC, etc. The nice thing about the McIntosh - there's not much of a "learning curve" involved - you just put the CD into it - push a button on the remote, and the entire CD is automatically encoded into FLAC in something like 6-7 minutes. And the McIntosh also interfaces with CD changers - so one can effortlessly copy multiple CDs at a time into FLAC. The other cool feature - being integrated into the owner's home theatre/audio system one can also easily copy vinyl and other analog sources to FLAC. And, you also get a high-quality CD transport with high-quality DACs with the Mac. There are some disappointments with the McIntosh - I'm surprised that the factory doesn't provide for the easy addition of additional or larger hard drives. And another huge limitation - at least for someone like myself who listens to Shoutcast webradio daily - the unit will only play WMA stations. I shudder to think of any device locked into Windoze' proprietary codecs. -- Cleve Two-channel system; McIntosh MC2205 amplifier McIntosh MAC4100 receiver Klipsch CF-4 speakers Denon DR-M3 Cassette Deck ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cleve's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2048 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21700 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
