So I've had a pair of new sb3's since Friday. The idea is to replace my very early slimp3. The hope is that 6.X will work well with the new hardware (it has never worked well with my slimp3, so I have stayed on 5.4.1).
The sb3 has been playing almost constantly since Friday. Today, I was eating lunch with the sb3 playing at a low volume.. Suddenly, massive ear splitting static from my hifi. The sort that sends your lunch to the floor while you make a frantic effort to mute the pre-amp. The noise was traced to the analog rca outputs of the sb3. The static occurred with every track I played.. I began a network traffic capture and I placed an urgent call to slim support with the hope of isolating this 'show stopper'. Basically, support reported that this problem has been observed twice before. The Xilinix chip 'somehow' gets corrupted during a firmware update, causing sample rate problems on the DAC. I was asked to re-program the chip (very simple, just a power cycle of the sb3 while holding '1' on the remote). That seems to have cleared the problem for now. Not sure why the problem did not occur sooner. The firmware was upgraded when I first powered on the unit Friday. Never had anything like this happen during years of using a slimp3. Perhaps there should be more self-integrity checking? I have been shopping for some new amps and plan on putting the other sb3 into a new listening room. I have been considering directly attaching the sb3 to the amps. This experience reinforces what my gut was saying all along, basically "Attaching a squeezebox directly to an amp? Are you f'n nutz??!!". Yeah, imagine a pair of 250 watt monoblock tube amps sending max volume static and distortion to your speakers.. Things were going quite well up until this point. Unfortunately, I cannot say that this was the smooth intro to the 'latest & greatest' product versions that I was hoping for. But, hey, the new case looks really.. uh.. big.. and new.. Still haven't decided whether to send them back during the eval period. FL _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
