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I'm sure timequest can take it, but if you can't see the humour, then so be it. Off base, I said, because you suggested you need to own the product to comment on it, and I completely disagree. I haven't commented on SQ, I've commented on subjects brought up on PSA's forum, with which I do have some experience, and where I've made a number of posts. I don't think you want people to only comment on items they own, that seems like an odd limitation. Also I doubt you want all comments to be positive. What I have said, I genuinely believe, and have said so robustly - so I hope you won't do what PS have done and pull some of the threads on their forum (not on account of my posts, incidentally). ZZ

You're certainly good at rubbing everyone the wrong way. It seems like most of your posts are either contrarian, in support of Linn, or bashing other manufacturers. At Computer Audiophile this type of attitude causes problems with people looking to increase enjoyment of this wonderful hobby. People don't visit CA to give themselves a headache or to read about how wrong they must be according to someone who has by his own admission no experience with a product he bashes. No Chris, sorry, you're off base. A couple of Bridge owners have been rubbed up the wrong way - that's no surprise, they already were rubbed up the wrong way by me on the PSAudio forum for being critical of PSA. Criticise at your peril with Timequest - he has his head so far up Paul McGowan's arse, it makes look like a prototype. I have made no comments on the SQ of the PWD+Bridge, as I don't own it and have never heard it - I've heard the PWT+PWD demoed at a hifi show, that's it. But I don't need to own it to bring up issues acknowledged by PSA on their own forum. As you know, I'm keen on UPnP AV, and I've made comments on here some time ago about looking forwards to the emergence of the Bridge. Unfortunately, while PS fans are entranced, I'm not. I spent a fair amount of time on the PSA forum, and have followed their progress. I would have liked them to do well - as I sometimes repeat, the more good, usable high res players there are out there, the better the chance of high res music taking off - but it's been amateurish. There have been a mass of complaints about drop-outs, PSA did acknowledge that it was not network related, they did end up blaming the flac codec and saying they would recode it, it has been months since that happened, and since it happened, users have claimed to experience 'microskips' as well as drop-outs. One problem with the PWD + bridge is that it has been put together from some (not quite) off the shelf components, for example the player software is a linux version of VLC. Linux VLC doesn't do gapless. Paul McGowan originally didn't see the need for gapless, and at one point suggested users tag their gapless albums as gapless. This was way after I'd contacted him to suggest he look into using the Linn UPnP AV extensions, which are open source and freely available, and he warmly replied 'we know how to handle this'. Unfortunately, with the linux VLC player having been bought in, and no accommodation for gapless in the original design, the developer who is tasked with retrofitting gapless must be having a torrid time. When you think of all the buffer control that you have to exert to maintain a seamless audio stream, and the compartmentalisation of PSA's design approach, it's no wonder gapless still hasn't been delivered despite a promise that it would be in January. And PMcG has rubbed me up the wrong way by blaming every other piece in the puzzle - be it music servers, networks, file formats, whatever - on his forum. The solution to all problems was: wait for our control point software (based on PlugPlayer), wait for our server software, all the others are flawed - blaming the very products that he has been inspired to ape. He's toned it down somewhat, after hearing complaints. But let's not forget that he said 'Plus, TMM [music manager software] communicates choices people make to our servers (anonymously of course) and when we see an album or know of an album that is gapless, we will check the box for you when you scan your library into the TMM database. Eventually, we’ll have all this automated when enough people install TMM. What am I missing?' It's cuckoo! His position has since moved on, but this is what the protagonist of the bridge thought back in December, well after it had been released. So, if you are a huge fan of PSA and don't mind paying full price for a product which is sometimes accidentally described by PMcG as still in beta test, with a lot of baked in bad/absent design decisions, crack on. PS forum members seem to like to say they're on the bleeding edge, and hence expect problems - well they shouldn't be facing these basic ones! Chris, I hope you can see that I went in to PSA with every good wish. I was bullshitted. I think Paul McGowan thought that some friendly bullshit and good feeling would do - well they won't. From the PWD blurb - 'So natural are these [Apodizing] filters that they just had to be added to the PWD' - well they're a built-in function of the Wolfson DAC. From the Bridge blurb - 'We knew from the beginning of our project that in order to give our customers a true high-end PS experience - one that would ensure that they would never have to be concerned about performance compromises - we had to do everything from scratch.' - Well they bought in and are having trouble modifying VLC! Matt/ZZ

just wanted to emphasise that there's nothing abount UPnP AV which needs anything other than bog-standard consumer network gear - a fact that can get lost in a tweaker's paradise... ZZ

none, wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.

Hi Eloise, Yes, indeed that is their next level up, and there is another level up from that, which includes amongst other thing dedicated wifi access points for improved controller performance and range. But the baseline recommendations will do for flawless streaming. In my London flat, I don't need a separate WAP - large houses may need at least one. Linn have dealers who need to work with existing home networks, and may not want to get involved with changing the settings of an existing router in a bespoke setup, so adding another is a straightforward alternative. Also, for more modest home networks, some ISP supplied routers are locked down - I think Sky routers at one point did this - and it was difficult to use them, or Sky would occasionally reset them, or something like that - and adding a new router makes that problem go away - hence the recommendation for an additional router. And sometimes people don't have any spare ports (in this case Linn say you only need a switch). But, nowhere do Linn specify a gigabit router, or any particular make. Of course they cannot know whether the router that has come along from your ISP will be an aberration or not, or whether you've already used up every single port. The main point, though, is that the basic configuration wouldn't be suggested unless it was expected to be anything less than functional.

Oh dear, more unending nonsense.

I'd also look at your network - a basic ISP supplied router is NOT going to hack it in a UPnP network - yes the overall speeds are fine but so much else is going on that there is quite likely to be network issues. Do yourself a favour and get a good gigabit capable network switch (yes the devices only need 100Mbps but the switching capability of the gigabit switch is greater). Brands such as Linksys and Netgear do good switches which may help with dropouts. Eloise, not true. Where did this come from, is it what people have been saying on here lately? I own 2 Linn DS players, one £40 Netgear 100MB/s router, and have no problem playing 24/192 on both. Nor does anyone on the Linn forum. Linn originally universally recommended getting an extra network switch, as most people's home networks have ISP-provided routers, and some UK ISPs prevent you from changing settings on their routers. But this is rare, and on the Linn forum, whenever anyone new comes on looking for advice on this, they're told by the Linnies to go with their existing router in the first instance. Linn have since modified their advice and are happy to suggest using the router you have already: http://docs.linn.co.uk/wiki/index.php/DS_Budget_System So there are no great demands placed on a basic domestic network equipment by streamed 24/192 audio. Plug and play being a pipedream, why? Ok, you may say this is a big proviso, but 'with a functioning network'... plug in a new Linn DS player, it will show up in control points a few seconds later, and you can play music on it. What's not plug and play about that? I'm afraid PS Audio's implementation is not good. They eventually said on their forum that they acknowledged dropouts and skips endemic to the bridge, and then eventually said they'd identified inefficiencies in the flac codec and so were going to fix that. No-one else has problems decoding flac - but they have an engineer footling around in unfamiliar code doing god knows what. I could go on... but this is the reason PSAudio are such a let down - a vast quantity of talk and hype, a bad implementation, they still blame networks where they can, if not networks then anything but their own hardware, and on the whole they've been a shockingly bad ambassador for UPnP AV.

but why recommend cables designed for 10GB for a 1GB connection? Overkill. More importantly, it perpetuates the myth that you will hear audible differences on a 1GB connection using augmented cables, which is, of course, complete bollox. If you get the data rate you need, you have the cables you need - I'm afraid Chris your recommendation is vague and prone to be misunderstood by those vainly looking for incremental improvements in SQ through their choice of ethernet cable.

for whatever reason, PSA hasn't given the unit to anyone for a mainstream review. Because by all accounts, it doesn't work properly - people talking about the lemon law on their forum.

from that description, I wouldn't touch their cables - clearly bullshitters. Elcorso is easily persuaded, doesn't mean you should be...

but then, we should expect nothing less Exeric, nothing at all against your call for power amps to be made to accept any reasonable input, but I am curious why you are focusing on the input stages of power amps, and not the output stages of sources?

A simplified summary of lossless encoding is it is a process for the complete removal of redundant data, which makes a FLAC or ALC file more susceptible to (uncorrectable) data error. This is not true. You could equally say that a flac or alac file is half the length of an uncompressed file, and therefore has half the chance of going wrong. The per-bit error rate is no different thoug. And, there is no scheme in wav/aiff to use the data which would have looked redundant to a flac compressor to recover errors. There are error correction and redundant data systems in hard disk storage, just as there are on CD-ROM, but less stringent than on CD-ROM, as the expected error rate is considerably lower.

I think chadergeist is harmless: http://www.myspace.com/chadergeist http://www.youtube.com/user/chadergeist Surprisingly no-one has brought up the showstopping DRM issues with minidisc. But it was very cool and a real upgrade to tape.

I had said: A corollary of this is the suggestion that resolving systems can detect differences between the things they shouldn't, like SSDs, HDDs, sata cables, etc. These things may have different EM emmissions, but a system that is resolving music will be designed so that these EM issues will be isolated so that they are nowhere near the noise floor. If you are resolving these noises, your noise floor is high, your (music) S/N ratio is low, and your system is not resolving. Presumably you cannot hear the subtle nuances in your music if you hear your SSD's EM emmissions on top of it! I think that's an inescapable fact. Peter said: On top of it ?? What makes you think it will be on top of it ? Or didn't you want to say that maybe ? Isn't noise UNDER the signal ? I'll leave this as a challenge for now... :-) Well... So what is noise? I think Demian said a little earlier that noise is random, but I think that he was being too specific, as that's not necessarily the noise I am thinking about. You can hear crowd noise, road noise, wind noise. Child noise. In all these cases, these are specific sounds, with some element of randomness. If you are having a conversation in a loud restaurant, and can't hear each other, you would say that it's noisy. I think this must be the basic definition of (sound) noise - stuff you hear that is interfering with the stuff you want to hear. Noise is perfectly defined as the N in the Signal to Noise ratio. Noise can be random, but it doesn't have to be. As for whether noise is over or under the signal, I don't think this matters. If you are playing loud, a little noise will make no difference. Play music quietly and you may be disturbed by a distant fridge compressor, or ticking radiators, or the hum of a central heating pump. These have specific frequencies and some of them are constant, and it's probably true to say that the mind is more tolerant of a constant hum than a ticking radiator sound. But, there is no doubt that when your fridge compressor turns off, suddenly you hear so much more in your music - your mind had adapted to the hum of the compressor, but it hadn't completed negated it in favour of the music. Surely that's the concept of the noise floor? So, I say again, a resolving system is not a system which can detect these subtle system changes, unless you are interested in the sound of an HDD or SSD's emissions. It is a potentially resolving system, but placed in an environment where it is picking up a lot of noise, which people hear interfering with the music. It's no good to say 'it's so resolving, it can detect the differences between wav/flac, hdd/ssd, different sata cables, etc.' because you are resolving noise, not signal. The Auraliti filters sound like a better approach, suppressing noise, if you must have sensitive analogue components within a general purpose computer - but I think this is a bad place to start. ZZ

Unless I'm very much mistaken, Linn's founder is still alive and kicking and closely involved with the company, although his son is CEO now after a career with Symbian. So a nice continuity there, but it was no shoe-in: Symbian made a leading and highly respected low-power OS. Cyrus are another popular and distinctive UK brand. ZZ