Koss Totem Mani-2 User Manual download pdf (Page 46)

Feedback

Listening Room

n UHF No. 75 we explained how to

use Apple’s iTunes program (free

for Windows and Mac OS X) to

get instant access to a vast music

library. What was not evident was how

to listen without taking a huge perfor-

mance hit. A very few computers have

digital outputs, usually optical. But

your computer and your music system

are probably not adjacent. How do you

get a pristine digital signal from here

to there?

The most tempting way would be to

somehow get it out of an iPod. Unlike

most portable players, the iPod can carry

music around in either uncompressed

mode or lossless compression (more on

that in a moment), or no compression

at all. And the larger iPods, like the

ofﬁcial UHF iPod on the next page, have

the capacity for it. At ﬁrst we thought

it would be a piece of cake to get the

digital signal from the iPod and into

an audiophile-grade converter. Wrong.

Converters expect to see digital data in

S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface

Format), and that’s not what the iPod

supplies. Nonetheless we believe it can be

done, and we are pursuing our research.

So how do you get a good digital

signal over to your stereo system?

There are several ways, though we

think the little machine shown above is

the best we’ve seen: the Squeezebox 3,

from Slim Devices. This device is so well

thought out and does so much, that it is

difﬁcult to believe it can be sold at such

a low price (US$299). Before we actually

get into setting it up, let’s look at what it

is and what it does.

The Squeezebox is a music controller

for your computer, except that it doesn’t

have to be connected physically to your

computer. If you have a wireless (Wi-

Fi) home network, as more and more

computer users do, it hooks on to that.

It can also connect by Ethernet, and

indeed there is an Ethernet-only version

available for $50 less. If you use a jukebox

program such as iTunes, the Squeezebox

can control it too. That means you can

use its remote to select any piece of

music that is in iTunes and call it up. If

you don’t use iTunes (as you can’t if your

computer runs Linux or Unix), Slim

Devices’ own software lets you do much

the same. The bright, large ﬂuorescent

display shows you what’s on.

The rear of the device has a plethora of

connectors. You can plug in headphones,

or interconnects to your ampliﬁer (there

is a built-in Burr-Brown DAC), or you

can use a coaxial or toslink digital cable

to put the digital signal right into your

own DAC, or into your one-box player’s

digital input. Enough for you?

But wait, as they say on late-night TV

infomercials, there’s more! You can set up

several Squeezeboxes, and they can be

playing different selections at the same

time, at least if your network has enough

bandwidth. If you get tired of the music

you own, you can also listen to Internet

radio, and you can set up the screen to

scroll through news headlines, stock

prices, or weather forecasts.

We do actually have a large collec-

tion of music on a hard disc, which is

there to feed our iPod (see The [High

Fidelity] Digital Jukebox in UHF No. 74).

Nearly all of it was compressed in Apple

Lossless, which as its name suggests

can compress music without doing irre-

versible damage. The Squeezebox also

handles the free lossless codec FLAC,

plus AAC, MP3, WMA (on Windows),

and lots more. What it can’t do is stream

protected music, such as that from

Apple’s iTunes store. Compressed music

from current stores is of little interest to

serious music listeners, however, and we

don’t consider that a dealbreaker.

Setting up the Squeezebox to con-

nect to our network was aided by clear

on-screen instructions. Once connected

it “saw” our massive iTunes collection

and gave us full access to it. From the

operational point of view, the Squeeze-

box is a wonder, marred only by a serious

security problem, which we will get to

shortly.

But we are audiophiles, and what we

really wanted to ﬁnd out was whether

what the Squeezebox provides is some-

thing we would want to listen to. We set

it up in our Alpha system, with its digital

output (we tried both coaxial and optical)

feeding our Counterpoint DA-10A con-

verter. Our ﬁrst observation: HDCD-

encoded recordings stored with Apple

Lossless compression maintain their

encoding. That much was interesting,

and since the code is found in the dith-

ering, it also means that very low-level

digital information is preserved through

encoding, decoding and transmission.

The proof of the pudding

A lot of our favorite test recordings

are already on hard disc, and that made

comparisons easy. We selected some CDs

High end Sound

From Your Computer?

Meet digital audio’s

missing link, the

Squeezebox

44 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine

1 2 ... 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 ... 83 84

Comments to this Manuals

No comments

Koss Totem Mani-2 User Manual Page 46

Comments to this Manuals