New Squeezebox Touch

[colinB]

Just got one of these tonight. Set it up in no time using it wirelessly from my laptop. Have to say im really pleased with it, especially with the spotify app.
I was going to put all my cds on my PS3 but im seriously considering using it as a stand alone player and ripping the music collection to Flac. I dont have a desktop anymore so i will have to think of what to use as media storage. Was thinking of a 2nd hand mac mini or getting a usb HDD for the laptop.
Any way , a lovely piece of kit and a bargain.

[Covenant]

Colin you have loads to discover. First of, have a good trawl of internet radio, if you haven't already. There are about 10000 stations some broadcasting in high bitrate. Radio Paradise and Linn Radio are a must. Shoutcast allows you to filter by bitrate.
Do you connect via a dac or analogue out?

[colinB]

Im playing it through toslink into my dac and having a lot of fun with it.
Im also very pleased that th headphone out is pretty good. Wishing i had not bought the headstreamer dac now as i have no need for it.
Wireless quality sounds great to me.

[recoveryone]

You are heading into some musical nirvana, once you get your collection all ripped and be able to use other apps.....Pandora, Lastfm..... you will ask yourself why did I wait so long. Just having all of that music as your finger tips, not having to get up and dig through hundreds of cases just to hear that one song. ENJOY!!!!

I just did some vids on the LMS and other SB items if your are interested...they are on youtube under "Recoveryone"

[Bluedroog]

In terms of storing your music collection have you seen the Vortexbox Appliance? There a few to choose from and they seem to offer a pretty good solution. Decent storage and a well thought out software as well as auto-ripping to FLAC. I'm sure you could get a better rip for FLACs with optimising settings etc but for computerphobes like me a system like this is very appealing. You can even use their software free so can build you own if you're either handy with electronics or even just turn an old computer into one. http://www.vortexbox.co.uk/VortexBox...78_706542.aspx

Another little tip is if you haven't already is to disable the volume on the Touch and set it to 100%, not just turned up, there is actually a setting to disable the control. It really cleared things up for me.

[icehockeyboy]

In terms of storing your music collection have you seen the Vortexbox Appliance? There a few to choose from and they seem to offer a pretty good solution. Decent storage and a well thought out software as well as auto-ripping to FLAC. I'm sure you could get a better rip for FLACs with optimising settings etc but for computerphobes like me a system like this is very appealing. You can even use their software free so can build you own if you're either handy with electronics or even just turn an old computer into one. http://www.vortexbox.co.uk/VortexBox...78_706542.aspx

Another little tip is if you haven't already is to disable the volume on the Touch and set it to 100%, not just turned up, there is actually a setting to disable the control. It really cleared things up for me.

How did it clear things up?

[Bluedroog]

In my case I was having a particular problem with a slight hiss on my playback, I had blamed every thing from my cables, power amp and DAC. I then tried setting the volume to 100% as I had heard this was the best for sound being 'bit perfect' and it completely solved the issued. I had gone from having the kind of hiss that I couldn't live with to a perfectly clear and clean sound. I had been racking my brains for a solution and had considered attenuators before my amp and mains conditioners, in the end the Touch was the culprit and a quick flick through the options has completely changed my listening pleasure.

I realise I had a specific problem which made the results very obvious but I have read of many other people reporting good results too. It takes a few seconds to try so any one with a Touch may as well see how it works out for them if they can live without the digital volume.

[colinB]

Thanks lots of things to check out
Just to be clear, its not just a case of turning SB volume to max but actually disabaling the volume is that right?
Also if you are using optical their will be no point in upgrading power supplys i presume?

[Bluedroog]

Technically I'm not certain if just turning it up to 100% and disabling it dose exactly the same thing although I think it does. However there is actually an option in the settings which disables it / sets it to 100%. There is something which I believe is unique to digital volumes controls that deteriorate the signal, at 100% you get the full signal as it was intended. Again I would assume simply turning it to 100% would do the same job but may as well just disable it altogether.

It's worst experimenting, you may find that in the context of your system there's little difference and would rather have the use of the volume on the Touch remote. With my old amp I never noticed the hiss and used the volume happily. Now is a different story.

I'm honestly not sure on power supplies.

[Fi-Wi]

Take a look at Soundcheck's Tool Box 3.0 as well.

I've been told it's a great tweak.

After years of enjoying my SB Classic (and still do) I will now add a Touch to my main system to make full use of my Spotify Premium account.