Now, on the larger scale: I'd like to hear Wright's Squeezebox in my residence. Regarding the silver disc players Srajan lists: The APL wasn't so hot in a direct A-B. The people at Audio Aero are so stuck up I wouldn't own their stuff for any reason. The Esoteric gear is nice. The TRL was preferred by the person who brought over the $18k two-box Meitner. Per TRL, an obviously biased source even though there's every reason to believe them, the owner of the $18k-ish Reimyo traded for the TRL...
Price doesn't guarantee quality any more than your or my endorsement.
The Meitner & Reimyo have been employed as state of the art cost no object Red Book references by professionals, probably most of which live in areas far more populated than the Greek isles. Have no idea if any have heard the Wright unit or other WiFi so-called references. It would be far more convincing if/when it became a growing list of professionals who switched from state of the art silver disc players to WiFi, especially, again, if the issue of connection variabilty & potential intereference was addressed.
Apologies if unrelated, but I just noticed within the past few days that when my unused electric toothbrush is charging in the same AC outlet as a portable AM radio the buzzing is so bad it's unlistenable. Read right here at this forum the list of caveats regarding noise pickup disclaimers for the NuForce digital amps.
To say this is all completely unrelated to WiFi performance variabilities in a high-end reference system seems unreasonable. Anyone who chooses to completely ignore the potential problem is welcome to go on their merry way w/ my full blessings.
It's pretty well established that hard wired connections are better than wireless. We can all look to our own personal experience w/ phones & computers as empirical evidence. It's reasonable to start w/ this assumption & wait for more than one pro reviewer in Corsica to proclaim the wireless model now equals or trumps the hard-wired.
Beyond that, there's the issue of wireless environments. I'm an electrical dummy, admitted. But I'm wondering how someone would come to the following conclusion regarding WiFi: an ultra-high-end WiFi digital source is no more likely to suffer performance changes by nearby wireless & hard-wired activity than any single-box silver disc system.
In other words, someone living on the Greek island of Corsica or wherever, w/ what one might safely assume to have slightly more wireless & hard-wired activity than Antarctica, will always have the same exact absolute high-end digital WiFi audio performance compared to the same system setup in the middle of Manhattan.
Some might conclude such an assumption is innacurate at best.
Hundreds, if not thousands (tens of thousands?) of Slim Devices and similar products are in use around the globe, and yet WiFi performance doesn't seem to be a continuing problem for anyone on the forums I frequent. There are probably at least a couple dozen users on this site alone, maybe more, but I've seen no complaints about interference.
Not even from those who live somewhere other than on Greek islands.
The issue is/was: reference high-end digital playback: silver disc vs. WiFi. Not a generic statement or belief in a lack of complaints about interference, which would appear to be a far lower standard than the lofty performance goals of reference high-end audio.
I believe a cursory search here would produce hundreds of posts regarding connectivity & operations problems of generic WiFi. Such problems might NOT be directly related to pure reference sound quality but surely no music playing at all is indirectly related (as in no music playing = no sound quality). IMO it may be a considerable stretch to conclude that none of the problem posts are related to wireless interference.
I am reminded of the Bound For Sound editor, who upon reviewing a Sunfire amp, was the apparent first to discover the amp also functioned as a great (unintended) radio reciever, at least in his use.
