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It's digital day for the Houston Audio Society on Feb 10th. If the thought of music from a computer hard drive makes you feel all yucky, better stay away, but if you want to hear how good it can be with uncompressed music files and the right equipment, this is your opportunity! The meeting is from 10 to noon, but earlybirds are welcome anytime after nine am. We will compare a Bolder Cable Company modded Squeezebox, an Anthony Padilla modded Transporter, and an Arcam FMJ CD player. Visitors are always welcome at our meetings. See the link for directions. Houston Audio Society Feb 10 Meeting
Gotta love that Squeezebox. I like Skip Pack's, and I think his was stock. Let me know what you think of the modded version.
Last night Barry, our club's most passionate hard drive music server enthusiast, brought over the Bolder Cable Co modded Squeezebox 2 and the Aberdeen Components/Maui Mods modded Transporter. He also brought over his Moscode amp for me to safeguard for a month while he's in Singapore. Tough job, but component sitting seems the right thing to do, and I suppose I'm just the giving kind of person:) We first listened to the analog outputs of my stock Squeezebox 3, then the modded Squeezebox 2, and finally the modded Transporter. Let me say the step from the unmodded Squeezebox to the modded one was like stepping from a Nissan Sentra to an Infiniti. Using this analogy the modded Transporter would be a Lexus. Not too much difference between the two modded components, but a clear difference between them and the unmodded version. The difference is mostly in the more dimensional and convincing soundstage and in the treble clarity - very much like the difference between a mass market DVD player and a $3K CD player. I hope this gets the attention of any Houston area audiophiles so you'll join us Saturday! Equipment For The Meeting
That's interesting. What's involved in the mods? Is it mostly capacitor changes?
The Bolder-modded SB2 has the full analog and digital mods, the "Ultimate Power Supply MKII", plus a few other extras like gold Bybees. See the link below to the Bolder mod page. The Transporter modes are a project under development by Anthony Padilla, who has sent this one to Barry for his feedback. I don't know what changes he has made. Bolder Squeezebox Mods
From the description, it looks like all good ideas for mods. The power supply is improved, in fact, in the "ultimate power supply" mod, it looks like it is entirely replaced. Another mod, the "digital and full modificatons", replaces the power supply filter cap with a Panasonic electrolytic cap, the analog IC is removed and a Sonicap is used to tie directly to the DAC output, bypassing the output op-amp entirely. They isolate the digital and analog sections, running them with two power supplies and swapping power supply caps. The stock DAC is replaced with a Burr-Brown chip. Sounds like good stuff to do, for sure.
I have doubts about paying $1K+ for mods on a $300 product, but it does sound good - much better than my stock model. Aesthetics are as important as sound to me (There, I finally came out of the closet and admitted it!) and I would pay a bit more for stock Transporter with some basic mods. If you were modding a stock car to get the ultimate performance out of it would you start with a Nissan Sentra or a 350Z?
Well that's true. And I have no problem admitting that aesthetics are important to me. If a company can't package a good product to look nice, then it can't be a great product.