For me it was the little box that Skip Pack brought to the Dallas Audio Club room and hooked up to the system. The Squeezebox from Slim Devices was hard wired to his laptop, whose external hard drive held more than 100 CD's in lossless FLAC file format. We played it thorugh the Lite Audio DAC-60, and it sounded very good to me. This device certainly gets an A+ for convenence. I'm still undecided about whether it sounds as good as a CD in a good quality player because none of the CD's available in our room duplicated the CD's Skip had recorded on his external drive, so we couldn't do a direct comparison.

We both live in Houston, and sometime after the meet Skip and I plan to get together to do some CD player / Squeezebox comparisons. We'll post our finding on the ART digital forum. In the meantime, if somebody has done some A/B comparisons between a Squeezebox and a CD player please post your findings on the Digital forum. Picture of the Squeezebox sitting on my CD player here:

http://greatplainsaudiofest.com/2006/Photos/DSCN0236.JPG

• Squeezebox

From what I hear, the show was terrific! Thanks for helping Mario out, and thanks to Mark Margiotta for helping with the shipping logistics!

I'm sure the photos are great, but even with a hispeed connection, these are way big for online viewing. Suck 'em through iPhoto or somesuch and shrink those babies down to about a 1/13 the size!

Dave

The enclosure is 9.75" wide, 12.75" deep, and 36" tall. The 9.75" width is about the narrowest I could go with the 8" woofer. The 12.75" depth is determined by the 11.25" standard width of 12" mdf boards plus the 1.5" thickness of the combined front and back panels. The 36" height is what's needed to get the tweeter to ear level. These dimeinsions yield a 1.8 cu ft volume, which is a bit too much for the Alpha 8, so I implemented a separate 6" high chamber in the bottom which could house the crossover or, as I implemented here, it can be filled with sand or shot. The volume is 1.5 cu ft, and it's tuned to 54hz with a 4" port.

The crossover is 1st order using a 0.47mH Jantzen 15 ga air core inductor in series with the woofer and a 6.0uF Northcreek Zen cap in series with the tweeter. There's also a 2 ohm resistor in the tweeter signal path that's bypassed by a switch on the speaker terminals, and a 16 ohm resistor across the tweeter terminals.

The objective of this design was to build a speaker that's inexpensive (about $100 per plus enclosure materials cost), efficient (95dB), has an acceptable WAF, and of course, sounds good too. The WAF drove the decision to use a narrow enclosure.

Asking the builder whether his speaker sounds good is like asking a mom whether her baby is pretty, or a cable maker whether cables make a big difference, but I'm more than pleased with the sound. I told Wayne he should offer a narrow tower enclosure as an option with the Studio One Pi. The Two Pi tower is a better speaker, but not everyone has a wife who would permit such a large speaker in her house. The One Pi tower, as I said, has a much higher WAF.

• The "FredAudio" F8 Tower

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