We have been quietly riding Squeezeboxen for over a decade now, with
Classics, Radios and Touches all over the house (never had a Boom
though). Even have a Receiver in a basement closet tied into our Nutone
intercom system -- and it plays nicely though a dozen stations when we
don't want to burn tubes elsewhere. And I am the caretaker for five or
six Classics and Touches installed at family member's homes. Even
manage TinySBS on one of them with a USB thumb drive library for someone
very space-challenged. And several Touches and Classics are still in
the box as reserves. With the constant updates here with LMS (nee Slim
Server, which I still call it) and super apps such as iPeng, we have
never had a need to migrate away, even after Logitech clumsily killed
it. LMS here manages over 75,000 audio tracks, from mp3 old time radio
shows, up to the latest 24/96 high-res albums. The squeezeboxes play
them all. Around times like Christmas, we will have as many as nine of
them synchronized off of our server, shuffling over 3,500 Christmas
tracks for sound everywhere, effortlessly, for days on end. No need for
the 50 song radio stations around here. Except for the Radios, all are
ethernet-wired -- maximum dependability, and it is. The entire setup
will run flawlessly for many months on end. What's not to love about
it.
Have done many hardware repairs and upgrades over the years. Fixed bad
Classic displays and failed coupling caps, experimented and built all
manner of PSUs for both Classics and Touches. Have figured out all the
tricks to keep the displays and things like Radio speakers running as
long as possible. And have tethered some very nice DACs to these old
gems to coax some very compelling sounds out of them. Our top system
runs a Touch at 24/96 pass-through, with a custom-modified PSU, to what
was a $3,500 DAC 15 years ago. Sounds terrific even today and still
competitive with the very best.
But today we did something special. We finally bought a 'new'
Transporter SE. For under $500, brand new in the box (NOS actually, so
not electronically new as capacitors go). I am very curious how it will
stack up to what we have managed to achieve with the lesser models over
a decade. I'm not so sure it can match the Touch/super DAC combo. But
we will see. For under $500, that's what I would have spent on a decent
new DAC alone.
But if it is close enough, at least we can reduce the chassis count for
the digital front end from four boxes to one. And unlike the Touch, I
will even be able to read what's playing from across the room again
(lol).
But the Squeezebox experience has been a very good one for this aged
audio listener. Might as well ride the greatest one off into the
sunset. As long as LMS keeps getting tweaked here, I'm still aboard.
As I said, there's no reason to abandon what still works so well.
sgmlaw's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13995
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=108470
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