update: after being powered on for an hour it was sounding much better. i guess even solid state stuff needs to warm up before use. that first 5 minutes was brutal.

finally got my new transporter, hooked it up and was immediately underwhelmed. even without an a-b with the cd player the sound is small, compressed and without nuance with an apple lossless file. transporter volume set to max. whats up with that? even the wife said it didnt sound good...

>I think his wallet is going to be sad lol better his wallet than his ears!

ive been trying to use rip but managed to encode only one disk out of 20 or so tries- kept crashing or giving errors. i tried max also from sbooth with no better results. i think my 18 month old mac mini superdrive is going bad so i ordered a new one. in the meantime i attached an old usb...

i tried one of these uca-202 and the sound that came out was actually physically painful.

when i was looking for a dac, the benchmark dac 1 seemed to be good basic choice. there are so many its a bit overwhelming. the cheap ones i have tried are pretty horrifying sound-wise.

i will be getting a transporter, and my wife has agreed to rip cds during the day while chasing our 1 year old around the house. the files will be stored on an external drive connected to a mac mini. i have used itunes but dont want to be tied to an apple-specific format. my question is...

i had originally thought i was looking for a cheap way to connect itunes from my dell-osx machine to my linn stereo, but eventually decided full streaming was the way to go. after weeks of thought i have pretty much decided to go with the sd transporter. the sound might not be up to the...

thanks for all the suggestions after much research ive narrowed down my choices to: 1. sd transporter: good interface, decent sound 2. linn DS, sneaky DS or majik DS: good sound, so-so interface, most expensive 3. benchmark USB DAC or similar attached to my netbook: cheapest, least...

in my active setup, there are two stereo amplifier that are modified with a circuit board that is installed in each amp- one for bass and one for the tweeter. these cards are matched to the particular model of speaker i have. the difference is pretty dramatic. the sound is not only better, but...

ive got a similar setup- a dell mini running osx, but no luck finding a USB DAC yet. the ones i have tried under $200 sound like crap. there were some good suggestions on a recent thread i posted about the blue circle thingee- which apparently is some low-end chip and isnt supposed to sound...

thanks for the welcome! ah, thats very informative. thanks for the suggestions. any guesses on what it would take to equal the genki? my wife wants the CDs out of the dining room so i thought i would put everything on a music server. i thought modern technology would have created a...

i recently bought a blue circle thingee USB to RCA convertor. i am hoping i have set something wrong because the sound is not at all what i expected. my reference is a linn genki cd player playing through a kolector preamp and aktiv bi-amped ninka speakers with a 10" sizmik subwoofer...