Customer Reviews

Logitech Squeezebox Touch

5 star:		(103)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

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.

Say goodbye to cd players and tuners. They are now history; no matter how much you've spent for them. I've just eliminated mine from my equipment rack. Now I'm sure there's some small improvements to be had here and there with some multi-thousand dollar gear, but for us common folk this is truly the only way to go. I've been a rabid though frugal audiophile for 40 years and this is the best.

Even without adding an outboard DAC this little unit surpasses my highly regarded $600 cd player. Not only does it get the frequency balance and microdetails right, but the sound stage is focused and spacious. AND even with the best cd player there's no way to put together playlists or play uninterupted music. If you've got a home theater receiver, compare both the digital and analog outputs because you will likely find the DAC in the Touch superior to your receiver. But before you do, break in the Touch for a couple of days to get the best sound quality from it.

And unless you've got an outdoor antenna and mega buck FM tuner the Touch will also far surpass anything you've ever heard from your FM tuner or receiver; plus you've got an absurd amount of stations to choose from.

Ok, now for some advice. Rip your collection to an uncompressed format or you'll never get really good sound. All the advice I've seen suggests using FLAC encoding. Its bit perfect and takes about half the space of using WAV files and is easily tagged - and its easily decoded by the Touch. Ripping your collection is a time consuming process. I highly recommend using dbpoweramp ripping software. It will rip to FLAC and it works to get the best copy of the cd that it can. Most important though is that you get a subscription to perfect meta which has had proper tagging info and album art for even my most obscure disks. Believe me doing a good job ripping your collection can eat up your time without the right software. Dbpoweramp is really valuable for this job and worth every dime!!

The easiest way to go is just to put your music on an external CD drive and use this with the squeezebox server built right into the Touch. If you've got a thousand cd's, 500gb of drive should more than take care of you. The Touch has a few limitation in terms of playlist size and how many other squeezeboxes it will support - but its got none of the difficulties or drawbacks of using an NAS server or your PC. But you MUST use a usb cd drive that provides its own power. If you have one that draws it power from the usb cable then get a powered hub and hook your drive into that and then hook the hub into the Touch. It takes maybe an hour to index the drive at first but then its done. Leave the drive on all the time and be sure to get one that goes into standby mode when its not used.
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Update 10/22/10
As I've gotten more of my disks ripped into FLAC files (about 900+ albums now)I'm finding I've reached the limits of the USB drive capabilities. Its just too slow, hesitates on music, etc. Running the Squeezebox server on my Vista computer worked fine, but I went ahead and got a Synology 210j network storage device because I really didn't want to have to turn on a computer to play music. I'd only recommend doing that if you're technically inclined but I will attest to the fact that Synology runs squeezebox just fine. Evidently you need a NAS with at least 128mb of memory and not all low price servers have that much.
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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.

After my 10 year old Arcam CD player died I looked at what options I had to replace it. I have over 1000 CD's and was in the process of re-importing them into my iTunes library as Apple Lossless, and so it seemed like a good time to explore options for directly playing my iTunes library in some way. I had read glowing reviews of the Squeezebox Touch but at a $300 price point, and coming from a maker of mass market webcams and keyboards, I hadn't taken it seriously.

A good friend of mine, and audiophile, convinced me to check out the Touch, so I did. The more I read about it, the more it seemed to be the perfect replacement for my CD player. It wasn't available on Amazon at the time so I bought it directly from Logitech's web site.

Overall, the Touch is simply incredible. The sound quality of wirelessly streaming my Apple Lossless iTunes library to it, connected to a Bryston amp and preamp and B&W speakers, is outstanding. It's a huge leap in quality over what I heard from my Arcam CD player, let alone from using an Apple Airport Express. And I haven't experienced any of the dropouts I always got from the Airport Express.

It did take me a while to get the Touch on my network. I have an older Apple Airport Extreme I was using in Bridge mode from my DSL modem/router. I had to change my setup so the Airport Extreme performed DHCP, and also had to change the radio mode from "802.11n/802.11b/g compatible" to "802.11g only". So after the two hours or so to discover these setting were required to get the Touch on my wireless network everyone else was really intuitive.

There's a large and growing ecosystem behind the Touch in terms of applets, plug-ins, and tweaks. I've been experimenting with having my MacBook Pro (running SqueezeBox Server) do the dynamic conversion of Apple Lossless to PCM instead of the default transcoding to FLAC, and a bunch of other tweaks you can find by Googling around. Most surprising was the ability to turn remote access on and see the Touch as a server in my Finder window, and the ability to SSH into the Touch and play around with its custom built Linux operating system.

Many people mention how surprised they are about how much they like playing Internet radio once they have the Touch. I'm definitely part of that group. I've played around with Pandora, Last.FM, and SomaFM in the past, but using the applets to access these services on the Touch is really simple and fun. Note that if you've paid for a premium Pandora account with a higher bit-rate streaming you'll get the default 128Kbps on the Touch for now, but apparently Pandora is working on fixing that. That said, many of the 128Kbps audio streams from Pandora and other Internet sources sound surprisingly good on the Touch and my Bryston/B&W setup.

While I will generally stream music from my iTunes library (on an external disk drive connected to my MacBook Pro via Firewire 800), I still want the ability to play some subset of my music library without my computer being turned on. NAS devices are still pretty expensive and seem to have performance issues for running the Squeezebox Server software. But you can play parts of your music collection locally on the Touch from either a USB flash/disk drive or SD card. I had a spare 2GB SD card and it worked great, as did experimenting with 4GB ad 8GB USB flash drives. I'll be picking up a 32GB SDHC card (the max size the Touch supports), to be able to play roughly 100 of my albums in either FLAC or Apple Lossless format locally, since I want to reserve the USB port for what I describe below.

While everyone comments that the built-in DAC is of very high quality, and you can get great sound out of the analog outputs (which is my current setup), the next step is to acquire an HRT Music Streamer II + High Resolution USB D/A Converter. They go for about $350, $300 for out of box. You can hook up this small form factor, dedicated DAC to the USB port of the Touch after a small number of tweaks. Now, for about $600 you have an audio streaming setup to your stereo system that would have cost many thousands of dollars a short time ago.

One usability bug I just discovered today, is that when you do the setup of the server software and click "Use iTunes" (like I do), there's no need to fill in the text boxes for the location of the music folder or playlists. The Touch software will find them. Instead, you can put the location of a non-iTunes folder in the textfield, such as where you store your 24/96 FLAC files from HDtracks.com or the B&W Society of Sound web sites.

I have been a fan of the Squeezebox product line since they were made in the USA by Slimdevices.

This is essential for any music lover. I have it hooked up to my DAC using the S/PDIF digital out and control everything with my android phone. Got all my music ripped to FLAC and also have a few 24/96 albums which this device plays flawlessly. This is the most least expensive transport I have but the most essential. The interface is easy to use, the touch screen responds well, but the most important thing is the sound quality. The Touch runs an embedded Linux and has ALSA doing the playback as one would expect. You can fiddle around by sshing into the device to modify it using software hacks which also means this thing is future proof. The server and firmware are open source so as long as this thing lasts physically it will definitely adapt to the future.

Internet radio is amazing, there's millions of channels to listen to. As I said add in the 24 bit 96 khz lossless file support which is flawless and you have one excellent investment for your stereo system. The Logitech team did a fantastic job on this product. It's minimal, functional and world class. I can't say enough good things about it. The unit sounds really close to my Bel Canto CD-2 cd transport, just a tad on the dark side like is common with Mark Levinson components, so it might actually be a tad bit better than my $3K cd transport for 1/10th the price.

After reading very good things about the device I decided to buy and connect it to my high-end audio in which the cables are more expensive than the SB. Although you may have heard many things about audio components the reality is that the soul of your equipment will be speakers and amplifier and you should not expend a ridiculous amount of many in players, and I am more certain about that after trying the SB touch. In general I follow the following rule: spend 50% of your budget in speakers, 30% in amplifier, 15% in source and 5% in cables. Many audiophile aficionados will disagree with me but the reality is that ABX blind tests give me the reason.

The SBox touch cannot be considerered by price and audiophile product but it does almost the same as some server-based systems costing 20 times as much. The SB can be connected in different manners and is very easy to set up a make it run. First, it will play any music storaged in your computer. The SBox server installed in your computer will recognize the SBox and will send wirelessly music in the vast majority of formats available in the market either for Mac or PC. Another way to use it is by connecting directly a hard drive to the USB port in the back or SD card in the side. This will turn out the SBox into a server itself that can be managed with an iphone or android phone. I found that both ways are necessary to cover all the normal necessities. The first way, using the computer as server, is probably the most powerful. Either way from the computer hard drive or even a NAS, the web server will allow you to organize and manage music similar to other existing programs such us iTunes or WMP. The disadvantage is that you will depend on computer and even using the remote control, you will need to have your computer on all the time. By using the USB port you will avoid this problems and can use the SBox as a regular player with a touch screen. The disadvantage about the latest way is that playing high resolution files encoded in 24 bit 96 kHz sometimes produces rebuffering of the unit and music stops. I have noticed than that happens in about 10% of the song that I have at 24/96. My impression is that this can be avoided if you connect non-massive hard drives of less than 500 Gb. However, if you do not care that much about this formats, it is not a problem.

About the sound, is probably what surprise me the most. I purchased the Sbox thinking that it will require an external DAC to provide my $10K amplifier/speakers system with reliable sound. However I am still amazed by the quality of the sound for such a small device. When you read audio reviewers describing the sound of two compared components they usually use words such as "slightly" or "little bit", but to me the big difference between a consumer system and a high-end system is the so-called soundstage. To make it simple, the soundstage is the ability of the system to recreate the music in the same manner as it can be heard in a concert room or hall. Vocalist tend to be in the front whereas percussion is in the back. Violins are nearby the audience whereas cymbals are placed in the back. Our ears can really detect this 3D disposition giving us a soundstage feeling that it is part of our enjoyment. For audio systems this is difficult to reproduce and the SBox does it perfectly. Nevertheless, do not take this for granted, you will need a very good amplifier and speakers to fully enjoy this. The Sbox reproduces perfectly the balance between voices and instruments, strong and powerful bass, bright highs and equilibrated mid range. If you really want to have the "slightly" openess, "little bit" more airness and "little" nuances that require hours of dedicated listening to detect, them you will need to add a $2k DAC. But remenber, according to my rule, you will need $6K speakers and $3.5K amplifier. Summarizing, the sound of the SBox will cover the needs of the immense majority of users.

I'm the type of person who normally prefers the sound of analog vinyl and tape over digital, and up to now has never too impressed with the sound of internet radio.

I must admit that I was blown away at the sound quality of internet radio streaming through the Touch. Listening to a live broadcast by the Montreal Symphony on Radio Canada streaming at 150K almost sounds as though the musicians are in my living room.

In addition to streaming internet radio, the Touch can also play music wirelessly off your computer, or from an SD card or USB drive that plugs directly into the Touch.

For the hardcore audiophile, the Touch also plays music encoded in the FLAC format, up to 24 bit/96 KHZ, which is supposedly way beyond what we humans can hear. I popped in my SD card of the Pizza Tape with David Grisman and Jerry Garcia--the sound quality was spectacular. In my opinion, it sounded as good as audiophile vinyl or Super Audio CD.

The Touch's touch-screen user interface is user-friendly, and colorful. It clearly displays radio station graphics as well as song information.

And the the Touch's remote control is also very easy to use. I pretty much use the remote control for the volume control and 'now playing', and the screen for everything else.

The Touch can also be linked to a free personal account on Logitech's hosted website, which can maintain your list of favorite stations.

And now for the negatives:

1. Browsing Internet Radio: The Touch lacks the basic feature of being able to surf internet radio by genre or by geographical region. Other less-expensive Internet radios have this fundamental feature. It's not a deal-breaker, because I can just go online and save my favorites to my account at Logitech's hosted website, or use the Touch's search feature, which works ok, but every internet radio should have a basic browsing capability.

2. SD Card Slowness and Clunkiness: I treat SD cards like the cassette tapes of yesterday--I rip my vinyl on them, at the aforementioned high resolution 24 bit flac format, which means that a 8 GB SD card can only hold 3-4 albums. The Touch was not designed to quickly swap cards. It can take 2-3 minutes from the time the card is inserted into the Touch to when you'll actually hear your tunes, and to make matters worse, you can't just walk away while it loads the card and wait for your music to load; the clunky user-interface requires you to press confirm buttons several times during the loading process. Same goes with the USB Drive. For people who are ok with lower-quality scans, that's not a big deal, because you can fit a lot of tunes on an 8GB (or higher) card, and then just mount the card once. But since my music is high resolution, I can only store a few albums on a card, so I'd like to be able to change cards as easily as switching tapes in my cassette deck.

As an internet radio and digital audio player, I would easily give this a 5-star rating. The sound quality of both 24 bit music and streaming internet radio is of audiophile quality and way better than CD. It also has a beautiful touchscreen and easy to use interface.

As an SD card or USB-drive player, I would only give the Touch three stars, because of its slowness. However, as I mentioned before, the sound-quality of 24-bit music is so superb that it is worth the user-interface clunkiness.

Hopefully a firmware upgrade will resolve the external card issues, in which case I will up my overall rating to 5 stars.

As part of the beta program, I've had a great opportunity to get experience with the Squeezebox Touch while they developed it's features.

If you're looking for the limitless option of a 6 million track catalog - this is your device with rhapsody! I have a local music library, but I get the most work out of my rhapsody account!

I've spent too much time searching and researching for a home-music solution that allowed easy-access to rhapsody in my house. I liked the option of playing anything that me or my friends felt like, which was convenient when we have parties- since I rarely like the type of music my party friends listen to. Now they can just search for what ever they want to listen to!

Since all the squeezebox products sync up, it's great. I started with a duet and an additional receiver. Since then I've added this touch and a radio. It's been a great full-home synchronized music system. House parties are set, just pass around the duet controller and the whole house has a growing playlist!

I have my touch on my bedstand, right next to my bed. I pull up a track that I'm in the mood for, select music-ip mix (which is a plugin you can install to make mood-based mixes), and fall asleep. (I usually make a mood mix on a good slow sting song). After the playlist is up, the clock screensaver takes over, so when I wake up the next morning, I can see what time it is.

There is an alarm feature built in- which I use in my bathroom- every morning I shower to the rhapsody 90's station.

I'm sure my review isn't quite as technical as others, but I wanted to highlight the practical use of this technology. It takes the hassle out of a full home audio system, and lets you concentrate on enjoying music again.

No more ipod docking for me. It's so limited.

If you're planning to purchase this device, it's important that you realize that it has some limitations, mostly related to its use as a stand-alone unit through its USB or SD inputs. When used with these inputs (via an external USB drive, USB memory stick, or SD memory card), the device uses its own so-called Tiny Squeezebox Server, a "lite" version of the more robust Squeezebox Server that you download from the Logitech site and resides on your computer. The TinySBS is not very stable. It works fine with the occasional USB memory stick or SD card -- and reportedly with a few select USB external drives -- but is not reliable enough for everyday use. A second limitation has to do with the sound quality of its internal DAC (Digital to Audio Converter) which is OK, but not of audiophile quality.

However, when used as a wireless music file player that passes through music files of up to 24bit/96kHz resolution (and will play, though with some loss of quality, files of up to 24bit/192kHz) through its digital output to a high-quality DAC connected to your stereo system, the Touch delivers excellent sound from files ripped to or downloaded onto your hard drive or external NAS (Network Attached Server). That it does it for $300 is truly remarkable.

If you prefer, or your wireless connection is no good, you can hard wire it to your router via Ethernet cable.

Oh, yes, and it also plays internet radio!