About a week ago I began playing w/ PC Audio. I got a three year old laptop w/ a Pentium III 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, a 20 gig hard drive and loaded XP Pro. I bought a 300 (actually 279) gig IDE drive and a fanless enclosure w/ USB. Picked up 2 PCMCIA cards, one for WiFi and one for USB 2.0 because older PC's don't include either only USB 1.1 (much slower.)
Put this setup in another room for noise isolation and got it on my home wireless network. Started using EAC to rip CD's to flac onto the big hard drive and connected it to my living room system via an M-Audio Transit using Foobar as a player and my cheap DAC. I found the sound quality to be better than any other digital solution I have tried.
There were some caveats however. The laptop didn't really have enough resources to run Foobar @ high oversampleing rates and rip CD's or even run a virus scan w/o clicks and other annoying noises. With nothing else running it was fine but you also had to walk over to it to set up play lists or change them etc.
I wanted to get this quality of digital playback into my bedroom system as well so SB3 was a natural using WiFi. When I was placing the order it occurred to me that with the $100 discount for 2 systems, I could have greater utility in the user interface in both systems for an additional $200
The two units arrived last night after work and they were up and running within 5 minutes. I can actually access the older laptop running Slim Server from the laptop where I am typing this post. I can set play lists for both players from here, really neat.
The sound quality w/ the stock players using WiFi and the cheap M-Audio Superdac 24/96 in each system is very impressive. The SB3 using the same DAC sounds better than the Transit, richer and more musical. I'm keeping my vinyl setups but for ease of use, they don't compare.
Granted, I'm a network admin but the technology isn't that difficult to figure out.
Very highly recommended. Inexpensive and good.
