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SB3 arrived

Well I finally did it, I bought and SB3. I've been running slimserver and softqueeze for sometime but didn't actually have the hardware.

I am pretty impressed, the unit is very well made, it looks quite impressive, even my wife likes the looks. The only physical problem I have is its a little TOO light weight, some of my more stiffer cables cause the thing to lift up off the shelf, I had to go with the estra limp variety.

Sound wise I was impressed, no its not as good as my homebuilt USB DAC, but its not bad either. I've listened to a lot of multi thousand dollar stufff that doesn't sound this good. Right off its obvious its using a digital delta sigma digital filtered DAC with op amps (after building a whole pile of DACs I can tell the "signatures" right off), but its very well done delta sigma op amps. On loud complex material it has a tendancy to "loose it" it gets quite congested and opaque sounding. When its outside of this range its quite detailed and well balanced extended frequency response.

I'm building a very good linear supply for it right now, I will report on that in a few days. I haven't done any mods yet, I'm not sure if I'm going to or not. I DO plan on hooking the I2S signals up to my DAC and seeing what that sounds like, then switch to Tent clocks and try that with I2S to the DAC. The ultimate approach is to use a Tent clock into a reclocker and send the same clock into the SB3, thus its fully synchronous and should give VERY low jitter I2S signals to the DAC. The architecture of the SB makes this an easy thing to do, but I haven't heard of anybody trying it yet, I wonder why, its not very hard to do.

John S.


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Topic - SB3 arrived - John Swenson 23:42:00 05/29/06 (4)


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