I am annoyed that Logitech has discontinued its superb Squeezebox Touch music player. I’d be even more annoyed if I didn’t own one. Playing on the Touch right now is, for me, the ultimate expression of audio technology as it presently exists — The complete Beatles on an Apple USB flash drive. The customer reviews on Amazon are all over the place, and I am very pleased to say you can ignore all of them that aren’t five stars. (No, I didn’t have a problem with the stem, as others have reported. The drive is secured magnetically, and maybe that’s given some people trouble.)
This thing is worth every penny, and maybe I’m just giddy because I applied all of my Amex Rewards Points to the purchase and got it for only $18, as a birthday present to myself, but the sound quality is what it is, and it’s absolutely outstanding. I’ve never been carried away with the sound of most — and I mean 75% or more — Compact Discs. I have never thought that digital audio was the problem, but that 16 bits aren’t enough. The dynamic range of CD is great, but so is the contrast ratio between solid white and solid black. The fine shades of gray — the nuances — often seem to be missing. Cymbals, for example, lack the shimmer they should have. Acoustic guitars don’t quite convey the feeling of the strings vibrating. Etc.
Despite my advancing age, my ears still seem to be good up to 12 kHz, maybe even 14 kHz, and listening to the Beatles this way is really something. With CD’s, when music gets loud, with a lot of instruments and vocals, I think everything sort of collapses into a flat-sounding mess, and I lose interest. The Beatles collection, copied from the original 24-bit digital masters, and compressed in the lossless FLAC format, doesn’t do that. Every little thing can be discerned distinctly and easily.
For sure, this is a specialty item for the very few with a lot of interest and the right setup, but at last there’s something better for listening to the Fab Four than the Mobile Fidelity LP’s from 30 years ago (I have a few titles, but not the box set). Enough talk. I’m going back to listening!
Amazon still has the Squeezebox Touch. At the moment they’re $250.
Sonos is available at Target, but I still think of it as a boutique product. The Logitech music server is probably off-putting to most people, compared to using iTunes. Maybe Logitech would have had more of a chance if they’d hooked up with Amazon for a Cloud Player app?
Waaaaahhh!!
I can’t believe it! Such a great product (line). Did Sonos squeeze them out of the market? Or was it still too much of a geek/niche product, what with needing to install software and all.
I will watch to see if these go on fire sale somewhere…