Slim Devices Transporter
By Nino Marchetti
August 6th, 2006
You may think you have the best sounding, best looking home entertainment system on the block. Your 50” plasma, TiVo, Blu-ray Disc player and Xbox 360 may be lacking one serious addition however: the Slim Devices Transporter.
Slim Devices, in their new Transporter home component unit, has essentially taken the technologies of their Squeezebox network digital audio player and put it into a great look, and most likely great sounding, device. Designed to look like it fits right at home amongst your home entertainment gear, the Transporter is targeted towards audiophiles who will probably immediately take to the unit’s thick aluminum chassis in a black or clear anodized finish.
Slim Devices Transporter with Remote
The look of the Transporter, which was designed by industrial designer Fred Bould, also includes dual fluorescent displays, which are reminiscent of retro stereo components. Also tied into the physical design of the Transporter are a variety of buttons and a dial for various controls on the front side, while the back sprouts a grouping of digital and analog outputs as well as an Ethernet port.
Getting past the looks of the Transporter, it offers a nice collection of technologies geared towards bringing digital audio from your computer or the Internet to your stereo speakers. This device, through integrated 802.11g wireless or 100Mbps wired connectivity, supports the following digital audio offerings: Apple Lossless, FLAC, WMA Lossless, AIFF, WAV, PCM, MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP2, MusePack, WMA, hundreds of Internet radio stations and music from the Rhapsody online music catalog. Working with the included software, the Transporter can play your music collection stored on a hard drive and supports the usage of playlists.
Rear view of the Slim Devices Transporter
In choosing the internal components for the Transporter, Slim Devices seems to have sought out a high end range of choices for producing a quality listening experience. This unit, for starters, has the AK4396 DAC, chosen for its “high dynamic range and low distortion”. This is coupled with a gold plated circuit board to keep digital and analog sections separate, three separate “super-regulator” circuits for providing power to the DAC and analog stages and polyphenylene film capacitors for the balanced amplifiers, among other features.
The Slim Devices Transporter, which is firmware upgradeable, ships with a backlit, 32-key infrared remote. More information on this device, priced at an eye-catching $1,999, can be found at the Slim Devices web site.