Koss 76 manual High END Sound

HIGH END SOUND

FROM YOUR COMPUTER?

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,

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In 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

44 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine

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

Meet digital audio’s missing link, the Squeezebox

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