A Tale of Two Transports

My first HiFi move in 2010 was to separate my headphone rig from my speakers... This required purchasing an M-Audio USB Transit for use with my headphone rig and some RCA to TS Adapters for my speaker setup...

As you can see from my sig, I now have my Squeezebox Classic connected to my M-Audio Active Speakers.... and the USB Transit serving as transport for my Benchmark DAC1... My HP laptop is my music server for both setups (running Squeezebox Server and iTunes respectively)...

My first thoughts on listening to the New Headphone Setup were "SWEEEEEET".... I thought (crazy as it might seem to some) that it sounded better than when I had my Squeezebox as Transport.... However, being an Audionut, I knew such impressions could not go unchallenged, so I eventually motivated my lazy self to hook up both transports and do an on the fly comparison between the Transit (using Optical and iTunes) versus the Squeezebox (using Coaxial and Squeezebox Server)... My Optical Cable is some no-name cable from my computer store and my Coaxial is an Audioquest VDM-X (yep, a real fair comparison )

Anyway, going back and forth on my favorite tracks for about half and hour last night I found that I couldn't find any appreciable difference between the 2 Transports...

Now of course those findings could be due to the excellent Jitter Rejection of the Benchmark DAC1, so ymmv....

Now whether you should purchase either the Classic (replaced by the Touch) or the Transit, really comes down to your needs and budget... as they are very different products feature-wise...

Since I spend a lot of time at my computer and prefer to have my best setup (headphones) there, then the Transit was the better option... I also find it much better for streaming music videos from yahoo etc than the Classic, which has a time delay....

The Squeezebox is excellent for setting up a Hi-Fi system away from my computer (nothing beats a remote control for that job)...