Monitor Audio RS 6 - Building up my system

[Raj64]

I have just purchased a pair of MA RS 6 and have placed an order for Cambridge audio 640A Ver 2.

I am considering the Squeezebox duet as the audio source. Would like to hear suggestions from the forum on best audio source to use for this config

 

[zeuiax]

I have just purchased a pair of MA RS 6 and have placed an order for Cambridge audio 640A Ver 2.

I am considering the Squeezebox duet as the audio source. Would like to hear suggestions from the forum on best audio source to use for this config

I would love to hear more about squeezebox too

 

[Adam]

Welcome to the forum!

Congrats on the new speakers. I wasn't going to post because I don't have any good input for you, but I didn't want you to think that you were being ignored. Hopefully others can chime in and give some great info.

 

[jamie2112]

Here is a little info anyway: http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_overview.html

 

[molly1]

I have just purchased a pair of MA RS 6 and have placed an order for Cambridge audio 640A Ver 2.

I am considering the Squeezebox duet as the audio source. Would like to hear suggestions from the forum on best audio source to use for this config

I also have Monitor Audio RS6,s and I bought a Squeezbox Classic back in July. The Squeezbox has just about done away with my c.d. player I am thinking about boxing it up. It makes your music collection so easy you just scroll through artist,album,est.in your libray.or you can choose on line music source,s like internet radio or Pandora,Slacker,ect.

All in all its a great way to have your music at your fingertips.You will need to have you c.d.s ripped to your computers hard drive. There are some pretty neat programs you can use to do this. I ripped mine both compressed and un-compressed. Your speakers will really show up poor recordings on low bit rate mp3s. and hard drive space is pretty cheap so you really need to use some type of lossless format to rip your music to. I choose FLAC.for use on my home system,and also ripped them at 320 mp3 for use on my wifes ipod,Itunes will convert the mp3s to mp4s.

 

[Raj64]

Thanks Molly1

Great to hear a positive feedback on this combo. Can you please tell me if your experience with the DAC. I trust you had ripped the C.D into lossless format.

From your feedback, I feel comfortable to proceed further with the Squeezebox duet. If anyone can tell me about the DAC output quality and issues if any with the wireless option.

I am looking for CD quality or better once the system is complete. Also open to alternatives to Squeeze box if any.

 

[molly1]

I belive that if you use RCA hookups then you would be using the Squeezbox DACS, if you hookup using toslink then your receivers DACS will decode.I tryed both and really could not tell much if any diff. I have it hooked up to a Onkyo 805 and I also tryed it hooked up to a Yamaha 2700.

I have the squeez. hard wired into my router and it was no problem to set up.I dont think that you will have any problem with using it wireless. Do go ahead and download the squeezcenter software from slimdevices and play with it. It has a thing called softsqueez that you can download and use as a player for your p.c.

As for c.d. quality if you have lossless quality music to stream to it I think it sounds every bit as good as a good c.d. player. Sonus also makes a very good mutiroom system, although it comes with a higher price.You can jump over to avs fourms and get a lot of info on both.Search for sonus vs. squeeze thread.

Good luck and enjoy your new speakers, they really are very nice arent they? Oh one more thing, I did not really belive in the speaker break in thing but after about 100 hrs. on the RS6,S and they really do sound a lot better.

 

[Raj64]

Cambridge 640a arrives!!

Hi Molly

Finally the Cambridge 640a (Ver 2) arrived today and I spent an hour setting up the speakers and the powersupply.

Slightly disappointed with the speaker terminals on the 640A. I am still waiting for the squeeze box to arrive. I have gone for the original squeezebox with the Burr Brown DAC.

Meanwhile, I used the Sony MD player and the Bose Wave Cd player as input devices and am amazed with the channel separation.

Speakers are 7 ft apart and only half a foot from the walls but no booming. I was informed that it would take 100 hours to get the system singing.

Very happy with the sound quality even before the system has broken in. Could be the acoustics of the room. Sounds better than at the showroom.

Will post update soon. Thanks for all your inputs!!

Raj

 

[Geno]

I'm another happy MA RS-6 owner, but don't put a lot of credence on the "break-in" thing. It's been proven pretty conclusively (In a thread on this site) that there's no such thing.

Of course, that's just my opinion...I could be wrong

 

[molly1]

Hi Molly

Finally the Cambridge 640a (Ver 2) arrived today and I spent an hour setting up the speakers and the powersupply.

Slightly disappointed with the speaker terminals on the 640A. I am still waiting for the squeeze box to arrive. I have gone for the original squeezebox with the Burr Brown DAC.

Meanwhile, I used the Sony MD player and the Bose Wave Cd player as input devices and am amazed with the channel separation.

Speakers are 7 ft apart and only half a foot from the walls but no booming. I was informed that it would take 100 hours to get the system singing.

Very happy with the sound quality even before the system has broken in. Could be the acoustics of the room. Sounds better than at the showroom.

Will post update soon. Thanks for all your inputs!!

Raj

Hi Raj,

Glad to hear that you like the speakers, I might add that for several weeks I was waiting on my sub to arrive and at first I was a little underwelmed with the RS6,S. They sounded good but just did not fill the room with Huge sound. Mabey it wasnt break in, who knows.

I do know one thing, room acoustics make a huge diff.with any speaker,and more so with speakers like the Monitor,s that tend to be very detailed on the top end.

I went with the squeez classic also. One tip, you can use something like winamp or mediamonky to create playlists and save the playlists to a folder and set it up in squeezecenter to look at that folder. It,s a lot faster than trying to use squeezcenter to create playlist,s. I really like using mediamonkey as a music manager and player, also does an o.k. job with tagging.

Keep in touch and enjoy the music.

 

[molly1]

I have a question for you guys,I dont have a center to match my RS6S, space is a little tight.What draw back do you think there would be in using a rs1 for a center ? I think you can only order in pairs but I could use the other RS1 as a 6 in a 6.1. setup.I currently have in walls as surrounds and they are mismatched with the Monitors but I dont really notice it with movies.

I know they say to never mix and match speakers but unless you listen to mulit-chan. audio I dont think it matters as much for surround effects as long as they are fairly good speakers.Anyone ever used a rs1 as a center in a 5.1 setup?

 

[Raj64]

The final end state- update

Hi Molly,

I had to make one final posting to finish this story properly

Firstly I set about uploading my CD's into iTunes using Apple Lossless format and simultaneously building a playlist of my favourites. This took a long time, but once it was all done, I saved the iTunes database and slim server was able to update itself.

I then went about playing the slimserver through the squeezebox and was able to access my favourites playlist. Sound quality is as good as CD.

I was also able to set up local radio stations and reception is excellent.

The key points for anyone who goes through this in future is that sometimes setting up Squeezebox on the network can be a pain. It is also useful to set up adequate buffering in the slim server parameters as well as use crossfade function to avoid getting nasty signal drops over the wireless.

Finally, I now believe in speaker break in period. These SR6's have really opened up and I am hearing greater details on both ends of the frequency range.

Here is the final config:
Cambridge Audio 640a (Ver 2)
Monitor Audio SR6
Squeezebox Classic
iTunes

Thanks to every one!