Logitech Transporter

By Matthew Masters

December 2008

Logitech Transporter wireless network music player, $3999

Front and rear of the Transporter (click for larger images)

Until a few weekends ago, and a trip into town one Friday evening, I’d honestly never realised there were so many SAS officers, airline pilots and Ferrari owners out there. But there were heaps of them, earnestly telling bored women about their fabulous jobs and vast wealth. You wouldn’t think they’d have to try so hard, would you?

Most bars on a Friday night are an exercise in advertising. And that’s fine as long as you’re not too credulous.

Here, I have to admit a degree of professional interest since in my other life, the one away from the heady world of audio reviewing, I write adverts for a living. And that means I am a complete sucker for advertising. To some extent you have to be a bit gullible to write the stuff well, and if I say so myself, I am extremely gullible.

Something to believe in

So I was quite keen when given a component to review that unashamedly claims it has been: “Designed to please the most discriminating audiophiles and music lovers.” And offers: “Sound quality that surpasses even the most exotic CD players.” It must be true, right?

The Transporter is Logitech’s first foray into the world of the audiophile. And they are out to impress.

“The first audiophile network music player”, “Bit Perfect streaming”, “Super Regulators”, “SmartScroll”, “MiracleDAC”, “TransNav™” and the unforgettable “Inspired by music. Engineered to delight.” all take their place in just two pages of the Transporter brochure. If hyperbole is a measure of sound quality, I was in for something special.

First impressions that actually impress

Like budget sibling, the Squeezebox, the Transporter is a WiFi capable network device that streams music from your computer to your audio system. Unlike the Squeezebox, it has a custom designed AKM AK4396 multibit sigma-delta DAC and a nice, brushed aluminium case with two huge displays and giant control knob in the middle. You’d almost think it had been designed to look good on a typical audio rack.

Looking at the back of the unit, balanced and unbalance outputs add a slightly recherché pro-audio feel. There’s also a selection of digital inputs and outputs (optical, coax and BNC), but alas no USB input, so using the Transporter for its DAC alone appears to be out unless you have an SPDIF or TOSLINK output available.

Something to play with

Actually using the Transporter provided a few minutes of rather shallow consumer enjoyment to start with. First there’s the TransNav™ controller with its “dynamic tactile feedback” – in other words, the number of detents you feel matches the number of menu options. But as soon as you pick up the rather cheapskate remote (the same remote that’s supplied with the $600 Squeezebox) that clever knob becomes redundant.

Then there are the displays that can be configured to show various snippets of information about the music being played, feeds from Internet radio, or one of a small selection of visualisers, including some rather natty analogue-style VU meters. Playing with those offers another five minutes of fun, but in the end I settled for the default VU meters.

“Bit Perfect” or a bit imperfect?

If its aesthetics, ergonomics and overt courting of audio enthusiasts mark a departure from Logitech’s previous audio devices, actually using the Transporter to play music is depressingly similar.

I had almost as many problems getting the Transporter to work with my Mac network as I did the Squeezebox a few months ago. In the end, the only way to get it work wirelessly involved completely reconfiguring my network to suit the Transporter. And even then it would only work if I kept my firewall switched off. Pretty far from acceptable for any kind of component, but absolutely unforgivable for something costing $4,000 and aimed at people more interested in music than networking.

My other bugbear with the Transporter (and the Squeezebox, for that matter) is that you are forced to use Logitech’s own SqueezeCenter (oddly, not ™) software. This is fine for feeding music to the unit, but fails spectacularly as a way of choosing or organising music on your PC or Mac. Why they can’t offer iTunes compatibility, I don’t know.

I’m listening, but am I believing?

Fortunately, the Transporter does have a very important redeeming feature. Probably the most important feature of all, as it happens. Because once you actually get the bloody thing working it sounds very, very nice indeed.

By “very, very nice” of course, I mean “as good as you’d expect from a $4,000 component”. The Ting Tings can hardly be described as a HiFi act, but That’s Not My Name from their debut album is driving and most of all, fun. Massive attack (if you’ll forgive the band pun) on the drums, a rhythm guitar line with perfect Fender twang and multi-layered backing vocals that remind you to be cynical about the production values of apparently “indie” acts.

With the Met Orchestra’s enormous rendition of Dense Sacrale (L’Eue), from Stravinsky’s controversial Sacre du Printemps (DG 457 895-2) proves the point. With its enormous dynamic swings and immensely complex interplay of orchestral parts it can be a challenge, but the Transporter gave a controlled and gloriously fluid performance with vacuum-like silences and final release of magnificent proportion.

Overall, nothing much is missed out of anything you play, but that makes the Transporter particularly unforgiving of compressed music formats. So if you’ve already ripped all your CDs to anything less than 320 Kbit/sec MP3 or AAC files, you’ll want to do the whole job again.

Inspired by music. Engineered to delight. Barf.

That’s what they say. No really, it is. And it’s probably true. In use, the Transporter is almost as complicated as learning to play an instrument, so its inspiration could well be music. Equally, the engineering is a delight – for people who are interested in trivial functions. But what of the overall experience?

Well, that’s where it all comes a bit unstuck. The Transporter is not much fun to use, and while it sounds good it doesn’t sound $4,000 good.

If I had $4000 to spend on a wireless music server, I’d spend $150 on Apple’s Airport Express, $1200 on a Perreaux DAC and $390 on an iPod Touch (to use as a truly user-friendly remote for iTunes).

Now I may be deeply credulous, gullible ever, but I’m not completely stupid. The $2260 I’d have left over would buy a lot of music, and even though I’d get fewer trademarked feature names, I suspect I’d enjoy it a great deal more.