hi, the nice ups man brought me mine this morning and after relieving me of 38 quid for the gits at customs i've plugged it up, installed the release version of slim server 6.0 and i'm now listening to music. i had an initial bit of a wobbler as it really doesn;t like the behringer ultramatch that i had sitting between my old squeezebox and dac it just sat there in mute silence flashing the emphasis lights on the behringer and a/s decade. after applying 240 volts to get my heart started again. i ripped out the behringer and tried again. this time music issued forth - whew.... my main reason for getting the new incarnation was the poor showing the sbox 1 put up against robbos dpa transport. now i wasn;t expecting miracles but i was stunned by the difference in quality between the two. i knew the sbox 1 wasn't the ultimate in transports as my decade (and dax 2) couldn;t use their low jitter / low noise crystal lock. instead they had to use their backup wide bandwidth cascaded pll locking system to acquire the sbox 1's signal. well if only to set the cat amongst the double blind pigeons the sbox 2 is demonstrably better in this regard at least as instead of saying just 'lock' on the lower left of my decades display it now proudly adds and 'x' to that indicating the incomming signal is low jitter enough to use the crystal locking. however as a dyed in the wool subjectivist this means nothing to me unless, to my ears, it sounds better. well i've not done a significant back to back test but certainly the treble smearing that i was hearing is a lot less and the bass is tighter, musical instruments are more separated (but still form a cohesive whole,yada yada yada). i'm not sure if it will match robbos dpa (fancy a rematch?) and i'd be very surprised if it could (for the price) however it certainly sounds a lot closer than it did before even though i'd probably put it on a par with the arcam we heard the same day in that it's lusher and not as forward as i remember the dpa. additional bits to the interface and graphics are quite nice too - the spectrum analyser and proper display are nice but to my mind not essential. big question is. was it worth the extra outlay? well it's probably a bit too early to tell but first impressions are 'oh yes'. cheers julian.
