Received one wireless, and one wired (intended for Bolder upgrades).
The case is tiny, and very cool looking. It comes with a little piece of polishing cloth, presumably to clean fingerprints. The display is awesome,bright and big readable letters. I have it set to show the "analog" VU meters during playback. It's like a retro Kenwood receiver. Very cool.
The walwart PS is a piece of crap. My cell phone has a better PS. Hell, the stock DIO had a better power supply.
I opened up the wireless one and had it up and running in about 30 minutes (after changing settings and updating firmware on my router). While I am awaiting delivery of a Mac Mini and 2 LaCie drives to form the basis of my music server system, I used my really loud office PC running Windoze XP to stream to the SB3, using Itunes. I ripped one CD (Greg Brown's tribute album) to apple lossless using iTunes, which I used to test the SB3.
I did a quick A/B of its DAC vs. running into my Tri-Vista 21 DAC. Not fair..but the SB3 DAC wasn't too horrible. Sort of like a new DIO after it is broken in: pleasantly surprising, but on close listen, the top and bottom detail is muted, flat, no air. Switching to the Tri-Vista put the boogie back in. Damn, even with AAC 128 bit files, the Tri-Vista and SB3 sounded way better than I expected. But not like my transport. The SB3 did maintain a constant lock with the TriVista.
In fact, neither the SB3 straight or into the Tri-Vista were a match for my current Pioneer Elite PD-S95 transport, which was more musical. But playing music via the SB3 is so much fun, I can't ever see going back to CD's.
Weeeee....I haven't had this much fun since Wayne modded my DIO a two years back.
So, I await Wayne's verdict on the SB3 mods and upgraded powersupply. I fully expect these mods to bring the SB3 to equal or better, exceed the stock SB3.
With the hassle of research I went through, I put up a blog to document setting up a music server from scratch, including software options, hardware options, and now the SB3 and various mods. See the drama unfold at
http://musicserver.blogspot.com/.
Or wash your hair.
