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Super Member
The external dac came about as I tried different devices. I was looking for something to replace the XM radio that sounded terrible in the home system. The Logitech squeezebox classic seemed to be a fantastic solution. It could play streaming services and centralized music files. Logitech media server was installed on the pc for central file support.
It wasn't too long after that I was learning about the better internal dac in the squeezebox touch. So there it was along with an upgraded power supply and a duet remote. It did in fact sound better than the old classic and worked fine over wi-fi or ethernet. The entire library was converted to quality flac files at this point. The top of the line Logitech product was the transporter and I was curious of just how good this could get. Unfortunately there was talk about discontinuing the hardware line(they did). This thing was expensive and I didn't want something that would potentially be unsupported.
After more reading there was a potential answer to the next level. A used netbook was ordered with an intel atom processor, ssd and no fan. It runs a very stripped down windows 7, foobar, and squeezelite. A new usb dac arrived around the same time at a good discount. There was some improvements noted yet something didn't seem to fit. A different dac arrived a year later when the budget was better and the homework was done. It was used at 3x the price of the first dac. This is what was settled on and I'm still picking up new details in songs four years later. An android app remote and a windows tablet remote on wi-fi is the icing.
It wasn't too long after that I was learning about the better internal dac in the squeezebox touch. So there it was along with an upgraded power supply and a duet remote. It did in fact sound better than the old classic and worked fine over wi-fi or ethernet. The entire library was converted to quality flac files at this point. The top of the line Logitech product was the transporter and I was curious of just how good this could get. Unfortunately there was talk about discontinuing the hardware line(they did). This thing was expensive and I didn't want something that would potentially be unsupported.
After more reading there was a potential answer to the next level. A used netbook was ordered with an intel atom processor, ssd and no fan. It runs a very stripped down windows 7, foobar, and squeezelite. A new usb dac arrived around the same time at a good discount. There was some improvements noted yet something didn't seem to fit. A different dac arrived a year later when the budget was better and the homework was done. It was used at 3x the price of the first dac. This is what was settled on and I'm still picking up new details in songs four years later. An android app remote and a windows tablet remote on wi-fi is the icing.