I also use a Squeezebox driving an external DAC (conrad johnson DA2-B) and the sound I get is most certainly cleaner and more resolving than with any of the transports I've tried. The digital PCM output is excellent quality and drives the DAC beautifully. The analog output is reasonable, but isn't really up to par with the current offering of mid-priced CD players on the market. For $200 however, its quite a value as a CDP replacement in a low to midrange system, and an astonomical value when compared to the price of a quality transport.
For reference, all of my music was extracted from CD using Exact Audio Copy and then encoded into FLAC format for storage. The combination provides a perfect copy of the CD audio and uses about half the space of the raw WAV or AIFF files.
For reference, all of my music was extracted from CD using Exact Audio Copy and then encoded into FLAC format for storage. The combination provides a perfect copy of the CD audio and uses about half the space of the raw WAV or AIFF files.