bejam

The same way you market any "luxury" product - take something fairly basic and ubiqitous and construct a "story" around it. Works in all sorts of areas of life - from Audiophool HiFi to pieces of conceptual art. My Swiss chronometer watch is crap at keping the time but it's made from pure unobtainium by little wise Swiss elves fed a diet of organic Emmental and biodynamic Pinot Noir. Easily worth the massive premium over a £5 Casio market special which is otherwise functionally superior in almost every respect... On the other hand, ferrite beads probably DO sound better - but perhaps only due to the expectation bias you're experiencing.

Gary. Don't know if this will be useful, but I gave up on WIFI with my Squeezebox - due mainly to signal distance and penetration. I then discovered the "home boxes" that you plug into the mains. These distribute an 80+ Meg network anywhere around your house. One caveat is that the squeezebox needs an extra switcher (£20 Netgear jobbie is perfect) between it and the wall plug converter - it couldn't find an IP address when plugged directly into the wall plug converter for some reason. I went a similar route to you a couple of months ago. I sold my Naim CDX/XPS after borrowing a DAC1 Pre from the UK importer and running uncompressed AIFFs (ripped with iTunes by the way.) The result was pretty astonishing and quite perplexing, having bought into the whole Naim thing for the past 15 years and the various power supply upgrades they flog. Anyway, my new setup is: Family PC with an outboard 500 gig G-Tech firewire drive - uncompressed 44/16 AIFFs with error correction ripped in iTunes, networked via the wall plugs, Squeezebox running optically into DAC1 Pre (the analogue inputs allow me to run a Technics 1210 turntable - just to stop me getting too giddy about all of these zeros and ones) which feeds a Naim 180 power amp and Shahinian Arc speakers. I don't find the SB software too bad and you can reference it to your iTunes database if you want to run that in parallel for iPods etc. I don't actually use the iTunes feature in SB - I just drag and drop the entire contents of my music drive into iTunes and then use it for local playback on the family PC. That way, iTunes doesn't dick around and try to reorganise everything. Probably flawed logic - but it works fine for me. Ben. www.bengiles.co.uk