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Squeezebox Touch vs. Rega Dac

M

M@ver1ck

pfm Member
I've got the sb touch -> rega DAC -> Mira3 -> Rega RS 5 speakers.
Earlier today, I bypassed the dac and went straight from the touch to the Mira3. I'm pretty sure that I couldn't tell the difference (with or without the DAC).

Either the SB Touch DAC is almost as good as the Rega DAC, or there is a different bottleneck in the system...

I've heard responses previously that it's the sb touch. Could be... I'm thinking it's the Mira...

Any ideas?

Or maybe the sb touch dac really is that good. I find that hard to believe though...
 
Tried both Flac and Apple Lossless. Apple lossless is just a little better. Network: both LAN and Wireless.
Lan goes through a router: computer to router to sb touch. The router is new, the network is probably from when the home was built, about 10 years ago. Can't say wired is any better/worse than the wireless.
Optical cables sound a little better than the coax. (Both > $100 chord company cables).
Chord Silverscreen something or the other speaker cables.
Chord Cobra plus rca cables.
 
All good then. Have you any option of trying another more direct connection to the DAC, with something like a MacBook and its optical out connection?
 
Crikey. I was about to buy a more modest DAC (v-dac or caiman) to improve my Touch. Perhaps it won't turn out to be money well spent..?
 
The DAC in the Touch is transparent, so using an external DAC won't make it any better. It might make it different, if the external DAC isn't transparent, but not better.

Audiophile magazine published a review of the Touch a few years ago with extensive measurements, which showed that the internal DAC was as good as anything else.

S.
 
mancunian said:
Crikey. I was about to buy a more modest DAC (v-dac or caiman) to improve my Touch. Perhaps it won't turn out to be money well spent..?
Click to expand...

I had a squeezebox 3. I found it's sound to be identical to the V-Dac (see the DAC bake off thread).

The rega sounded nothing like the squeezebox 3 however. I don't know if the 3 is similar to the Touch.
 
The fact that the two codecs sounded different suggests something isn't working quite right somewhere as they should sound identical (they are both lossless) unless the SBT is struggling to decompress in time. I've set my SBT system up to do all the decoding at the PC end of things, and I think it sounds better that way. Through my main system the SBT analogue was not really that good, and was better through my Behringer DEQ2496 as a DAC. I now use the SBT straight into some Meridian M3 active speakers in my office and it sounds fine, for an office system.
 
I did the following comparison recently:
1. FLAC Direct from Squuezebox Duet (SBD)
2. FLAC on SPD via optical to MSB Link DAC III with upsampling
3. CD from which FLAC was taken on Sony SCD XA-5400ES
There was a pretty big difference between 1 and 2 (2 was fuller, richer and more warm sounding), but negligible between 2 and 3.
IMHO a DAC is a must if using the SB in any kind of HiFi environment.
 
For about a week, I habe now been a proud owner of a much lauded Calyx DAC. With flacs it sounds at least as good as I expected. The project is to replace my SBT with something more reliable (a notebook - maybe not immediately more reliable, but at least I can fiddle around it until it works)

As yet, I have compared the Calyx to the sound od my £2k 10-yrs old Audiomeca CD player.

I have yet to hear a difference. Both are very good.

I will soon do an A-B test Calyx/SBT and I am pretty confident that the Calyx will win (well at the price it bloody should), but I don't expect a 'huge difference'. Anyway, as I said, the move is not really about sound quality, but rather about throwing out the SBT which is a source of permanent hassle, and I don't need that while I'm in my lounge.
 
chris shorter said:
There's quite a big difference between the SQ available from the analogue outputs of your Duet and a Touch. I have both and the Touch is obviously better.

Chris
Click to expand...

I noticed, having re-visited the specs, that one glaring difference with the touch and the duet is "Audiophile Acoustics". I have been unable to work out what this actually means.

To be honest, the duet controller is a bit of a pain in the rear, so may go down the touch route sometime soon (though may wait a while -- Logitech will no doubt release something new in the near future).
 
Before you blame or praise anything, make sure your room is set up properly. In that system, the room may be the true bottleneck. Not saying any one component is the be all, end all by any means, but a system is only as good as the room it's in.

If everything is optimized (computer stuff included) and you still don't hear any difference, nor a difference to justify price, sell off the DAC. No sense in keeping an expensive piece of gear that's for all intents and purposes worthless in your system.

For the record, I own and love the Rega DAC. I've compared it to many DACs above and below it's cost. In my system, it's easily worth it's cost. But my system, room, and ears aren't a universally occuring phenomena. Too many think their's are.
 
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