LOGITECH SQUEEZEBOX TOUCH
- Listen to an infinite variety of World wide web radio stations, on the web music services, and your iTunes collection through your existing home stereo with this easy-to-use Wi-Fi music player
- Enjoy simple station and music control from anywhere in the room with a full-color touch screen, intuitive menus and remote
- Experience full, rich sound supported by high-resolution encoding
- Connect seamlessly to your home network through Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and also to connect to other Squeezebox players
- Part number 930-000074 or 930-000090 may be shipped, as these are identical products
Logitech Squeezebox Touch. The color touch-screen Wi-Fi music player that lets you discover a world of music—all through your stereo.
List Price: $ 299.99
SALE Price: $ 285.00
Rating: 
about 1 year ago
Highest quality wireless audio streamer in its price class,
I purchased my Squeezebox Touch directly from Logitech, and have enjoyed it enough over the first few days of ownership to write a quick review.
To understand where I’m coming from, it may help to know I enjoy classical music, especially when its reproduced by a traditional stereo system with high quality discrete components. I own a British designed and built integrated amplifier and some tall floor-standing speakers from a Canadian manufacturer. Sound quality matters a whole lot to my enjoyment of music, and that shows in the care with which I select the components in my audio system.
I have owned a number of Logitech’s previous Squeezebox WiFi streamers, including the Squeezebox Classic and some Duet receivers, so I am not new to the Squeezebox ecosystem. I keep my music collection as a large library of FLAC-encoded files, so as to avoid any potential losses due to codec compression artifacts.
On receiving my new Squeezebox Touch, I swapped out an existing “Slimdevices” branded classic Squeezebox in my main HiFi system for the new device. The Squeezebox Touch first discovered MySqueezebox.com as its source of music and asked me to provide login credentials, which caused it to upgrade its firmware from that site. After that, it rebooted and was able to connect to my local Squeezebox Server that I have running to serve music around the house. After that, I was able to browse my music collection and navigate to internet radio stations either using the touch interface or by using the supplied remote control.
I noticed that the interface automatically uses bigger fonts if you are controlling it from the IR remote and smaller ones if it finds you are controlling it via the touchscreen, which obviously makes sense when you are within an arm’s length of the display.
As a first test, I played back a 96kHz, 24-bit high resolution copy of Marianne Thorsen on violin with the TrondheimSolistene playing Mozart’s D-major Violin Concerto. At first I played the tracks via a Benchmark DAC1, which is a studio-quality monitoring DAC for use by mixing engineers. The sound was detailed, rich with a deep stereo image and musically involving. Next, I removed the Benchmark DAC from the signal path and tried again. Once again the sound was clearly better than a CD could provide and very close to that rendered through the Benchmark DAC. There has clearly been an improvement to the quality of the analog stereo outputs compared to previous Squeezebox versions, which was already pretty good.
I then went on to listen to Emanuel Ax, Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma playing some Mendelssohn Piano Trios. This recording was “only” in 16-bit/44.1kHz CD quality audio, nevertheless I was soon captivated by the musicality of the performance, and could find no significant short comings of the quality as rendered by the built-in DACs compared to the external, studio quality Benchmark DAC1.
Someone starting to use this system without prior experience of Squeezebox Servers or software might face something of a learning curve to begin with. I can’t speak to that, but I appreciate that I was able to drop this new device into an existing system and, within a few minutes, start to enjoy some very high quality reproduction of my music library.
The advantages over the previous Squeezebox Classic are:
* Color, touch-controlled user interface and display
* Ability to play back high resolution music without loss of quality
* Excellent audio quality from the analog outputs; significantly better than previous versions.
Another possible advantage is to use the Squeezebox Touch as a music server as well as a client, by attaching a USB hard drive to the supplied USB port. I have not tested this functionality, so I can’t comment on how well it works. This review was mainly focussed on sound quality.
Based on my short experience, I recommend this device highly. I think it is a worthy successor to the Squeezebox Classic, as it provides significantly more in terms user interface and sound quality for the same retail price as the older player.
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|about 1 year ago
Amazing device; this new generation Squeezebox has great sound too,
This is an amazing product. It is my first Squeezebox product – really my first attempt at home to do computer based audio outside of just using iTunes and plugging my computer headphone jack into a stereo, which is great fun and sounds just OK – no where as much fun or as great sounding as the Touch.
I have been waiting for a product that I could use in my audiophile home stereo. Logitech SB Transporter seemed like a good bet but it was a bit expensive ($2000) and reviews described a quality of sound (lean, detailed) that is not my cup of tea. I’m a tube guy. Love LP’s, love tube amps. Sweet lifelike sound.
If you are at all curious about computer based audio to feed your home stereo, you can stop reading here. Just buy this thing. It is amazing. It is not perfect. Some aspects of it are easier to configure than others. But for me, and I know for a lot of other people, it is a life changing experience as regards my use of music in my home.
I “rip” cds into iTunes using Apple lossless for computer playback and at a 256 bit rate for small capacity iPods. They both sound excellent when played by the Touch, either via analog out or via digital into a third party DAC.
This product is MOSTLY very easy to set up and use. It found my wifi network quickly, and it found the iTunes library on my Mac quickly. I am getting internet radio stations from all over the world. The sound from the analog outputs is now – with this new generation Squeezebox – EXTREMELY good. It has great tonality and is very lifelike. I’m comparing my superb Cary cd player (the 308T with tube output stage) to the the analog outs of the Touch and also to the digital out of the Touch into a Bryston BDA-1 DAC. The Bryston is winning awards, and it sounds incredible, (over $2k new, around $1400 used). I use the digital out of the Touch to feed the Bryston and it sounds fantastic. It is very close to my awesome Cary cd player ($2500 new plus upgraded tubes).
But the analog out of the Touch also sounds excellent. The Bryston and my Cary CD player both have a bit more detail and place the instruments and singers more distinctly in a sound-stage, and they have a little bit tighter bass, BUT BUT BUT the Touch analog output stage – for just $300 – has excellent tonality, excellent detail, deep and well controlled bass….. It is shockingly good. I may or may not get a 3rd party DAC for my home stereo (the Bryston is borrowed from a friend) but I don’t feel that I NEED to.
I bought a second Touch to use in my bedroom stereo. I am keeping the first one in my main high end audio system. As I say, I may or may not end up adding a third party DAC in the latter system, not sure, but certainly not for the bedroom system.
Caution: I am having some trouble configuring some aspects of this device, such as controlling it from my computer. The basic functionality is working great. The Touch is taking music off the server on my Mac, no problem. And also I’m playing music off an SDHC card in the Touch (the first Squeezebox to offer this functionality, as I understand). Feeding the Touch directly with an external hard drive is working hit or miss. Trying to use the computer based “player” for the Touch is mostly miss.
The remote is great. When you start to use the remote the characters on the screen get bigger – it’s perfect.
There is apparently a community of programmers that build third party apps for this thing. I’ve not yet begun to explore that. Some are free and some have nominal charge.
I am giving this 5 stars because it is a fantastic device; mostly easy to configure, sounds great, sounds even better when feeding an external DAC, and downright life-changing when it comes to home entertainment. I am tempted to deduct a star because of some aspects that appear buggy or hard to configure but I just can’t do it.
The Touch ain’t perfect, but it is fantastic.
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|about 1 year ago
From perfect to barely OK…depending on what you need,
If the primary reason you are interested in this device is that you want to play your own music collection by connecting this device to a stand alone USB drive, then you should read this.
The squeezebox touch device can function in two ways: running a squeezebox server in itself when it directly connects to USB drives or SD disks, or connecting to your computer which has the music files and runs a squeezebox server.
Pro: Excellent sound quality, very good interface and touch screen;
Cons: The major issue comes if you want to use the device with USB drives. (1) The SB touch does not recognize Mac OS drives, only FAT/NTFS/ext2/ext3 are supported: this information is not listed anywhere except on a wiki-page on squeezebox devices. (2) The music play is spotty. For Apple Lossless format (if you rip your music from iTunes), the device constantly skips tracks, in fact it almost never finishes a single track! For FLAC (free lossless audio codec) music, which was supposedly the native format supported by SB devices, the player stalls from time to time. The sound suddenly disappeared even though the status bar is still showing playing. One possible reason is the communication between the device and the external hard drive is not smooth or gets lost. This is a severe problem if you want to play High definition FLAC files (24/96). (3) SB touch does not play ape files when it runs its own squeezebox server.
Caveat: If you have a computer or server dedicating to this device, you can either connect them by wi-fi, or by ethernet cable directly (in this case the Touch directly reads data from your computer and does not eat the bandwidth of the wi-fi, indeed the ethernet cable functions as a data cable). The advantages are obvious: the computer does the decoding and the touch only needs to do DA conversion with its sluggish processor. I never have any problem playing any music if the Touch reads music input from the computer, and it can handle ape files, too.
Bottom line: The major issues with this device to me are all related to the software, which presumably will get updated in future and could have a lot of room to improve. On the other hand, the sound quality is very good and the remote controller works very well.
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