In this months Hi-Fi News, page 65 - review of the Philips NP100 (potential SB competitor with a colour screen):
"Comparing the S/PDIF digital outputs between the Philips and Logitech proved unproductive". Not only ungrammatical (does ANYONE proof read this stuff?) but also meaningless. What do they mean by "unproductive"? do they mean they heard no differences or they couldn't do the test for some inexplicable reason? AAARGH! Later on the same page: "Clearly the limitation in sound quality comes from the source file and the wireless streaming..." compared to a WADIA 381i CD player ???? This makes no sense at all. The wireless transport is irrelevant to sound quality and a proper rip makes the "source file" at least identical to, or possibly better than, what is coming off the CD. This is just lamentable journalism which seems to me to be designed to promulgate the ongoing denial that conventional moving transports are dead in the water - as openly acknowledged by a few heretical high-end manufacturers (Naim, Linn spring to mind). In the same issue is a rather favourable review of the new PS Audio Perfect Wave 2-box CD transport/DAC at a cool £6k. It's party piece/USP? - well you can burn high res (32/192 max) files onto a CDR via a PC and play them... Well call me old fashioned, but I don't want to burn discs on a PC so I can play them on the one machine in the world that is capable of replaying them. I've just spent the last 4 years getting ALL of the disks out of my house! (OK so later it is explained that an as yet unavailable add-on module called "The Bridge" will provide net streaming from a PC) What are these guys smoking? - why didn't they just ditch the moving transport and make a great network streamer+DAC like the Naim/Linn/TP, at a resonable price - say £2k? They seem to have lost the plot completely (especially at the price point they are operating at). Anyone want to hazard a guess at when the last high-end transport will be discontinued? - I reckon 2013. So 4 more years of increasingly desperate industry denial... -- Phil Leigh You want to see the signal path BEFORE it gets onto a CD/vinyl...it ain't what you'd call minimal... SB3 (wired) - TACT 2.2X (Linear PSU) + Good Vibrations S/W - MF Triplethreat(Audiocom full mods) - Linn 5103 - Aktiv 5.1 system (6x LK140's, ESPEK/TRIKAN/KATAN/SEIZMIK 10.5), Townsend Supertweeters, Blue Jeans Digital,Kimber Speaker & Chord Interconnect cables Outdoors: Boom ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=64972
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