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skikirkwood

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  1. Yes, the top-level domain audiostream.com redirects to stereophile.com. What I meant is that outside of a few articles republished on Stereophile, all of the audiostream.com content is no longer online. It's all gone. The cost to keep it online and, therefore, get traffic through Google searches is close to zero. Same is true for Innerfidelity. Curious as to why AVTech Media didn't keep all of this content online.
  2. What's interesting is that when Audiostream eventually shut down it went offline. It's a Drupal site and would cost $15/month to keep the content up, and I'm sure it had a lot of good SEO. And they could do redirects to Stereophile, so why would they do that?
  3. Well, I didn't call him a shill in the post, just questioned the objectivity of whatever ridiculous review he just wrote up at the time. It may be true that Lavorgna pays for his own equipment. But it's also true he would never post reviews of $50 Rasberry Pi streamers or inexpensive DACS that could rival the performance of the equipment he reviewed at 100X the price.
  4. So back when Michael Lavorgna was the editor of Audiostream, I really pissed him off with a comment I posted that suggested there was a close relationship between his non-stop glowing reviews of expensive equipment and Audiostream's advertising dollars. He personally emailed me, threatened to block my account, and was just a total obnoxious jerk. Obviously, I hit a nerve, suggesting he was a marketing shill for high end audio manufacturers. Which he was. This was back in 2015, and I told him that the same lack of objective thinking present in Audiostream, where the more you pay, the better the sound, without proof, people hearing huge improvements with $1,000 USB and Ethernet cables, was the same thing going on in U.S. national politics. People didn't care about logic or facts, and we saw what happened in 2016. Attached is part of my comment on one of his reviews that set the whole thing off.
  5. I too spent a lot of time trying to get a USB DAC working with the SBT. I wrote about the journey from CDs to streaming in a Medium post back in 2016: https://medium.com/@skikirkwood/how-to-play-2000-cds-without-a-cd-player-d6f231057971
  6. The advantage of my CD player breaking and replacing it with a Squeezebox is it motivated me to rip my collection of 2,000 CDs years ago.
  7. I have to say, that's a pretty good conspiracy theory! The guy who runs the ISP I am on went to high school with SlimServer's founder in Cupertino, CA, so I guess I should ask him. The most amazing thing about Logitech though is years after they existed the Squeezebox and Transporter business, they still had a dedicated software engineer maintaining the LMS. And he's amazing, and also wrote the current Spotify plugin for the LMS. Not many companies support old product lines like Logitech did here.
  8. I just asked the ChatGPT to cite its sources. It said was a based upon a combination of historical knowledge of the tech industry and decisions Logitech made at the time. But more interesting, it suggested I check out tech publications that covered Logitech at the time such as Engadget and The Verge. But most interesting was it's final suggestion was for me to browse consumer reviews and audiophile forums, and communities like Audiophile Style (formerly Computer Audiophile). So this LLM is actually pointing me to this this community.
  9. I'd like to know why Logitech shut down their LMS/Squeezelite-based hardware products. People loved them. I am guessing it's due to tech support costs. The Squeezebox cost $300 I recall. But despite having a computer science degree and working in the web/tech industry, I had to call up their support people with a networking problem I had.
  10. I also run Volumio on one of my Pi's, another audiophile Linux distribution. I even wrote its Spotify plug-in years ago in Node.js. But Volumio tends to be flaky, whereas the LMS is rock solid.
  11. I bought a Logitech Squeezebox years ago after my CD player died, and loved it. I now have a bunch of Raspberry Pi's throughout my house, mostly running piCorePlayer with the Logitech LMS and Squeezelite. I control these with both the iPeng iOS app and the LMS UI with the Material skin. Both work great. I think it was really smart of SlimServer, the company that created the LMS and Squeezelite before Logitech acquired them, to have open-sourced all of their software. There's a ton of great plug-ins for the LMS. The sole engineer at Logitech who maintains the LMS software wrote a fantastic Spotify plug-in. One of my Pi's has a touchscreen interface, and I have the same UI on the display as I had with the original Squeezebox with the open-source Squeezeplay softare.
  12. Another popular "audiophile" Linux distribution is Volumio. I rewrote the Spotify plugin for Volumio several years ago. I found piCorePlayer to be more stable than Volumio. But if you're not familiar with the Logitech Media Server, Volumio might have a shorter learning curve to install/use.
  13. I also use the iOS iPeng app as a controller, along with the browser-based LMS interface using the Material UI skin plug-in. I added a touchscreen display to two of the Pis too. I used to use (and still have) a Logitech Squeezbox as a streamer. The LMS and its ecosystem were open-sourced before Logitech acquired the original company (Slimserver). So all of the software that ran on the Squeezebox (both server and UI/player) now run on all kinds of devices, including piCorePlayer.
  14. I have a bunch of Raspberry Pis in my house running the PiCorePlayer Linux distribution. It includes the Logitech Media Server and Squeezelite audio player. I have one of the Pis as a dedicated LMS server and also share the music library on it (2000+ ripped CDs) to my network as a Samba mount.
  15. Regarding the audible effect of various power supplies, you may find this blog post worthwhile: https://archimago.blogspot.com/2019/07/measurements-switching-power-supplies.html
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