Author Archives: Thomas Nielsen

Impact Acoustics USB wall plate


usbsuperIf you have a USB device you need to connect to your media streamer and need to run it more than the 5 metres USB is usually capable of, Impact Acoustics offer a neat little wall plate kit that lets you run USB through twisted pair up to 50 metres. The end points fit a standard American wall plate but a bit of ingenuity should suffice to fit it in a European panel. This repeater is USB 1.1 compatible so it should actually be able to feed a DAC like the Bel Canto or Benchmark from a PC based media center stoved away in another room. Definitely worth a try.

Impact Acoustics offer a broad range of connectors, flush mount or on-cable.

Impact Acoustics Impact Acoustics

The kickbutt streamer of tomorrow

…or my definition, anyway.

I ask myself, if I could call one of these fine companies tomorrow morning or perhaps just after the weekend, and have them build a streamer perfectly fitting my needs – what would it look like? The streamer, that is. Well, here is a list of the features that really are ridiculously cool:

  • First of all it should be able to rip from CDs, store them in a lossless format, preferably Flac, replay them an stream them to other clients.
  • It must be able to use off-device storage, such as a NAS.
  • It must recognize uPNP devices on the network and itself be one.
  • Tracks and playlists should be manageable from a web browser.
  • Analogue input, like the Arcam or the Colorado vNet.
  • A nice sized display and not relying on a TV or computer monitor; not saying that it shouldn’t support one. The display equipped remotes like that of the Sonos are wonderful.
  • Digital output. The thought of putting a Benchmark or Bel Canto on the end of it is almost making me weep.

There are a couple of things, I haven’t seen yet. One thing that springs to mind, is realtime conversion. Consider this: You have a neat little MP3 player and you have a whopping music server, serving Flac right and left. See the problem? You want to go for a jog around the neighbourhood with the latest Brett Anderson recording from B&W Music Club soothing your ears, only the server persists on shoving Flac down the throat of your measly Zune. If you could connect your MP3 player to the server and have it save a playlist as downsampled MP3 to a USB device – there wouldn’t be a dry eye in our household.

I would like to see statistics. Which files were played when. I would like to see it scrobble to last.fm. I would like to see it stream from last.fm. I would like to see support for private streams – streams that require a user to log in.

Yamaha MCX-2000

Yamaha Like a bunch of other devices here, the Yamaha MCX-2000 offers CD ripping, storing and streaming. A total of 16 playback clients, including the server, is supported, letting you access music from its 160GB upgradable harddisk from just about every conceivable location. While it does not appear to support Flac it does support raw PCM letting you record and stream lossless audio.

Unlike most others it can write CDs as well.

Yamaha Yamaha

Apple TV

Apple TV It just occurred to me that I had forgotten one of the major players in the field of digital media – Apple. Last year they canonballed their Apple TV into the arena and it really does deserve a mention.

The device is, as the name so subtly implies, primarily a video streamer. It can stream from internet services such as YouTube or movie rental services, as well as from an iTunes equipped computer. More interestingly, at least within this blog’s scope, is its audio support. While it doesn’t do Flac or Ogg-Vorbis, it does support Apple Lossless, which is just as good, if somewhat proprietary. In fact, B&W Music Club offer their recordings in Apple Lossless as well as Flac. Otherwise you will have to convert from other formats which can be excruciatingly tedious.

An obvious short coming, is that it requires an iTunes service to stream from. That means that it cannot stream from your average NAS disk, if any at all, but requires a computer be turned on somewhere. Making up for that it sports a 40GB or 160GB harddisk to hold tracks locally.

Apple Apple

Philips NP1100 Streamium

NP1100 The Philips Streamium system has been extended with an internet radio, not entirely unlike the SLA5500 mentioned in the Terratec Noxon article. This time, however, the device looks a lot more together – it’s got a bit of bling, even. It doesn’t appear to support lossless encoding but it does recognize uPnP services on the network and connects both wirelessly and with twisted pair. On the output side there are 2 analogue outputs, headphone and line out, as well as a coax for digital connectivity.

Philips Philips

Chord QBD76 DAC

QBD76 I mentioned the Chordette Gem earlier. Now this little diamond has spawned a big brother in the Chord QBD76 DAC. The QBD76 is a truly high end DAC as you would expect from Chord Electronics. The major addition to DACs in general and its predecessor alike, is a the very same thing that makes the Chordette Gem so original – Bluetooth reception. An abundance of digital inputs, including USB, makes it a versatile hub in your audio system even so; but Bluetooth A2DP support now adds your mobile phone to the equation.

Incidentally. If you remember the old Flash Gordon comics, do you not hear Dr. Zarkov exclaim while straightening his back and pointing: “Duck Flash! That rocket ship is armed with a QBD76!”?

Chord Electronics Chord Electronics

Peachtree Audio Decco

Decco This is not your everyday device! Period. Well, exclamation mark, really. It is not a streamer but a DAC with an integrated 50W amplifier with a tube driven preamp. It has an USB to connect to a computer and an assortment of digital inputs for other digital devices. Add to that 2 analogue inputs and you have a centrepiece for your audio system.

Slotted Sonos Now to the digital inputs. The Decco supports the Sonos system in a queer way. Not by interfacing to the proprietary Sonos network, nor by responding specifically to the Sonos remote. No, no. It has a cavity in the back where you can slide in the unpowered Sonos ZP80 and connect it by coax. Out of sight – out of mind, they seem to have been thinking. That’s a new one.

Peachtree Audio Peachtree Audio

Arcam FMJ|MS250 Music Server

Arcam MS250 A household name in hi-fi circles and it can hardly surprise anyone that Arcam too have a media streamer. It supports lossless encoding, even if it is unclear which formats. The MS250 contains a 400GB harddisk and ripping capabilities. Add to that streaming to 4 simultaneous zones and that in itself should be a nicely equipped addition to most audio systems. What makes this apparatus truly stand out is not its digital connections but its analogue input. It can actually record or stream from an analogue source – nifty! Really; consider streaming from your turntable to 4 different rooms… nifty!

Arcam Arcam

Sooloos

Sooloos

The Sooloos system consists of three different components. The Store which is the actual disk, the Source which streams the music to up to 32 zones and the Control which is a 17” touch screen with a built in CD drive [“Music isn’t all zones, terabytes, and signal-to-noise ratios”, they say]. Additional controls in the form of a 7” remote or a 7” satellite are available.

The Sooloos is the second system I have come across that uses mirroring on its datastore. Considering that hopefully more and more music will be downloadable in lossless audio formats the backup implications become more challenging; in case of a disk crash, how do you get your music back? A CD is straight forward. Buy it again and rip it once more. With music from, let’s say the B&W Music Club, you are in a jam. You cannot simply redownload music from previous months. A backup is actually a very good thing to consider in these days of digital distribution.

An interesting and rather important point with the Sooloos system is that CDs are ripped as one large file rather than individual tracks. This ensures that when songs or, perhaps more importantly, musical movements are played in order, they are played with exactly the gaps they were supposed to. If you play individual tracks they are seeked at runtime, so the obvious shortcoming of this method has been taken care of.

Sooloos Sooloos

Pinnacle Audio athenaeum

athenaeumI think the guys at Bel Canto may have had a finger in the soup when Pinnacle Audio named this raw beast. House of Athena? Whichever way you look at it, it is a beautiful name for a device that would more aptly be called a machine.

The athenaeum holds up to 4 750GB harddisks for a total of 3TB of disk space and unlike any other streamer I know of [at least of the type befitting this blog] supports RAID1. Supported file format include Flac and Ogg-Vorbis but it can rip to MP3 and AAC as well. The device is managed from a web interface or from the included [wifi enabled] remote control with colour touch screen.

The athenaeum has a smaller sister called folio. The folio has roughly the same specs but has only 2 fixed disks instead of 4 replaceable. It comes in 2x250GB, 2x500GB and 2x750GB flavours. Ample space for most, even in Flac.

Oh, and guess what?! The brochure for the athenaeum quotes Henry VIII… “In sweet music is such art”. Could it be an ode to miss Capulet?

Pinnacle Audio Pinnacle Audio

Barebone device Barebone device
Cheap good featured Cheap good featured
Actual hi-fi device Actual hi-fi device
High end hi-fi High end hi-fi
Out of this world Out of this world
CD CD drive
Wifi Wifi
Flac Flac audio
Digital IO Digital IO
Ogg-Vorbis Ogg-Vorbis
uPnP support uPnP support
Video Video

Please note that the ratings are not objective in any way nor are they a measure for quality. They are a measure for what I think the target group for the device was intended to be; my expectations if you will.

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