Today's Stereophile e-Newsletter has Wes Phillips taking a hack at the ReQuest F2.250 audio server. Like most of these one-box players, it is essentially an expensive computer ($3500).
One thing was confusing about the review. Wes says the F2.250 has a fan and was designed to go in a closet - yet he connected a $650 touchscreen to control it. He says he installed the F2.250 in his office and controlled it from his listening room with a Java remote installed on his wireless laptop. Yet Wes also says he connected the analog and digital outputs to his audio system (he would have to to hear any sound). I have to assume that he ran long cables from the office to the listening room, which seems totally counter-productive. Why not just skip the audio server altogether and run a long cable from his computer? The $3500 F2.250 has a 160GB hard drive. The $5000 F4.500 has a 320GB hard drive. That's a lot of cake for a drive that costs maybe $30 more than the 160GB. But the F4.500 has outputs for 4 zones and the F2.250 only supports 2 zones. What's the deal with these zones? Well, to use zones, you have to run audio (RCA) cables from the ReQuest server to various rooms in the house. Then you need amps and speakers in each room. If you want to CONTROL the playback from a different room, you also need some kind of networking and a computer or laptop at each location. Seems very clumsy and redundant compared to the Slim method, where audio AND control signals travel over 1 ethernet cable or through the air via wireless. Wes also had some trouble with the FreeDB database (don't we all?). It wasn't clear whether the database is preinstalled on the hard drive or whether it gets lookups over the internet, but it's clear that you're stuck with FreeDB for lookups. Wes also lost several thousand cool points by calling Ogg Vorbis 'Vogg Orbis'. He liked the sound of the ReQuest, but for critical listening he said he would use his megabuck Ayre Universal Player. Sooo...the ReQuest seems like an awful lot of trouble and expense just for background music. He's gotta keep all those CDs close at hand for when he really wants to listen to them, sorta defeating the purpose of loading a music collection on a server. It's amusing to read reviews of these expensive audio servers. It just makes Slim's design seem infinitely more elegant, flexible and futuristic, as well as ridiculously inexpensive in comparison. -- Pale Blue Ego ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pale Blue Ego's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=110 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=23952 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
