Originally Posted by
electric beach
If you use the Squeezebox Touch with any external Dac, I'd say it's an essential thing to try and is just what's needed to allow the full potential of the Touch. Thanks to Triode, the designer, for a very impressive piece of work.
As with any mod, the important part of the equation is the time needed to spend with the change, in order to evaluate it. I fell in love with this mod immediately, but later on wanted to make sure I'm not merely nursing the much dreaded 'expectation bias'. So I borrowed a friend's 'vanilla' Touch, and set it up as a parallel transport in my system. Now I was ready to do the side-by-side comparison.
Much to my surprise, I found that initially I tended to prefer the 'vanilla' Touch. I felt that the modded Touch somehow lacked something. The good news, to me at least, was that the two transports definitely sounded different, beyond any trace of a doubt. At least I don't think all that effort was in vain. But the problem was why was I prone to favor the plain vanilla box?
So I did some more comparative test listening. To cut the long story short, turned out that I was gravitating toward my crusty old habits, formed over the decades of listening to distorted, jittery digital music. Old habits die hard, and my ears have been accustomed to hearing that special 'digital nervousness' in the sound, which tends to introduce certain exaggerated presentation of the reproduced music.
With the modded Touch, this digital nervousness seems to have been somewhat tamed, and those digital artifacts that were responsible for creating the exaggerated effects have vanished. Because of that, the music now sounds less exaggerated, more natural, and I'm becoming aware of the need to adjust my expectations while going over the familiar old passages.
Don't you just hate it when you cannot detect where the post ends and a signature line begins?
Alex.
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