Does The Squeezebox Touch Have a Worthy Successor?

If things stay as they are now, I'll probably just wind up sending a Sonos to W4S and letting them do an upgrade on it. The only real advantage that the SBT has over the Sonos is the ability to do hi res files. Personally, I've found hi res downloads to be hit and miss at best; so I don't think I'll miss it much.

I really don't think that you'll find anything close for the $300 price tag.

I have both the Sonos and the Squeezebox. I started with the Sonos and loved it, but then I got it into my head that I wanted to get into hi res. The Sonos tops out at 16/48. The Squeezebox will do 24/96 out of the box and will do 24/192 with the addition of a 3rd party app.

To be honest, I really don't know that pursuing the ability to play hi res files was worth it for me. I download most of my stuff from HDTracks and I've gotta tell ya, the quality of the hi res files is hit and miss. With some, the improvement over 16/44 CD rips is unmistakable; with most, I'm really hard pressed to be able to tell the difference.

It really sucks because the hi res stuff isn't cheap, usually running about $18 for an album of 24/96 and $25 for an album of 24/192.

I know that the Squeezebox has gotten a lot of good press and deservedly so; but I've really enjoyed my Sonos as well. The Sonos is just plain bullet proof. I've never had a single problem with it. It is very well supported by the manufacturer and the free controller app is very refined and easy to use. It is much more intuitive and bug free than anything that you can get for the Squeezebox.

I also know that the Sonos has taken some criticism here due to it suffering from a lot of jitter; but, on the other hand, I've spent many countless hours enjoying the music coming from the Sonos unit being fed by CD rips from my NAS.

The way I see it is that the Sonos is weaker than the Squeezebox in three areas.

First, with the Sonos, you have to stream content from a computer or NAS. There is no option for using a USB drive or SD card. Second, there's the jitter issue. Third, the Sonos doesn't have an IR port, so all control has to be through an iPad, iPod, or some other sort of smart device. The third thing is what gets me, because I like to build a play list and then just control everything with my Harmony 900 remote, which I can do with the Squeezebox.

The Sonos goes for $350. I say, give it a try. I think it's the closest you're going to get to a Squeezebox Touch. If you don't like it, return it.

I don't know why this didn't occur to me before, but the AppleTV works pretty well too. For the $100 price tag, it's a pretty capable piece of gear.

I played quite a bit of music through it and it sounds pretty good. I just don't use it for music much now that I have the Sonos and Touch.

I really don't know about that Bryston unit. Just looking at the specs, I'm getting the feeling that most of the price is going to be for the name.

For the money, you could get into a modded Mac Mini, build a CAPS server, get a modded Sonos unit or a number of other options.

Of course, I haven't played with one, but again, just reading from the specs, it sounds a whole lot like a pre built CAPS server.

Ozzy, if all you're worried about is pulling files off of a 1TB drive, there are plenty of ways to do that. I'd first attach that drive or transfer the files to an NAS. Once you do that, there are a bunch of possibilities.

You can get into a Synology single drive NAS device for around $300 and use an external drive for backups.

Ozzy,

You really don't need to be computer savvy to setup a Synology Diskstation. You just pop the hard drive into it, plug is into your router/switch/hub and run the setup disk. Next thing you know, it shows up on your network.