Thomas Nielsen | media|STREAMERS

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Lossless music; even if I am a copy cat

bwmusic Bowers & Wilkins, or as they are more likely known to most, B&W, have started a music club partnering with none other than Peter Gabriel and his Real World Records. The idea is to offer music in lossless compression to those [of us] who twitch over the MP3 downloads that are so popular. Bandwidth is soaring and disk space googolic – let us have music in its pure form and not in a tin can. We can take it!

Every month a new album will be published for download in Apple Lossless or Flac, ready to be put to CD or thrown straight at your media streamer; all at a yearly subscription rate equalling roughly a mere 5 or 6 CD albums. So, if you like being subjected to something new once in a while, this is cheap whichever way you look at it; and bloody good quality to boot. Last month featured Little Axe – this month Grindhouse (mondo cane) and the next is Gwyneth Herbert. A truly varied selection.

Oh – the copy cat thing? Super cool blog spot Download Squad posted this this morning.

Did I say lossless compression enough? Take a look at the cover art you get with most download services. If it is even there it is usually restricted to a measly thumbnail of the cover. Even that is lossless in B&W’s club… you can download an actual booklet or insert with every CD. Printing it can be a bit of a challenge, though. But that is hardly their fault. No, this is going to be very, very nice.

Thumbs up! And let us have some copy cats already!

B&W

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Chordette Gem

British audiophile magazine What Hi-Fi? just released a quick news article on their web about an interesting device from Chord Electronics [otherwise known for their insanely exquisite high end audio components] – the Chordette Gem. The device is something as ingenious and yet so simple as a Bluetooth DAC. The idea is that you stream music from your mobile phone via Bluetooth. For more orthodox purposes it offers a USB socket as well.

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Harman/Kardon DMC 1000

harman Like a couple of other devices mentioned here, this is one of those almost-need-to-have things. It rips, plays and serves. There is a CD/DVD transport that supports ripping a CD to the internal 250GB harddrive. It can serve up to 4 concurrent streams and it can play DVD videos. Stylishly concealed on the front there are slots for memory cards and USB sources. It has it all… but why in the fury fires of marshmellow meltdown have they omitted lossless fileformats? It supports MP3 – that’s it.

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Tivoli Audio NetWorks

Tivoli Audio are known for some of the coolest table top radios on the market in general and for Henry Kloss’ design in particular. They too have jumped on the wagon and done a streaming piece of art with their new NetWorks.

NetWorks streams internet radio stations as well as playing FM radio and DAB. Supported file formats include MP3 and WMA. It is unclear if lossless formats are supported but unlike most others it supports Real Audio.

Sonos Digital Music System

The Sonos Digital Music System is more than just a streamer. It consists of a server connected via twisted pair to your network and a controller with a color display. The server relays music to other Sonos devices via their own proprietary wireless network optimized for audio. All Sonos devices can play either their own playlists or play in sync. Everything controlled from the neat little handheld remote.

If you have more than one device only one of them needs to be physically connected to the network. The others receive their data wirelessly from there. There are three different types of devices to choose from: The ZoneBridge that does nothing except bridge the physical and wireless network – an access point, if you will, and two ZonePlayers that have actual playing capabilities. One of these ZonePlayers comes with a built in amplifier – the other without. In my book it is the latter that is most interesting. You simply connect it to your existing system – maybe even with a Benchmark Dac1 for conversion.

The entire system is controlled from up to 32 controllers or from a PC using some cool looking software – very nicely laid out.

Sonos

Thomas Nielsen

June 15, 2008

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You scream, ice cream, uPnP media stream

Most of these streamers have uPnP support and it occurred to me today how important that really is. One of my two streamers does not support uPnP but it does support scanning a network location itself. That should suffice, one would think. But the problem is that our music server stores more than a thousand albums and scanning it every time there has been an addition takes a very long time [I am being very diplomatic here]. Our uPnP server on the other hand does this in the background and keeps the list of music up to date. Clients get immediate response upon a request.

The general setup is this: We have a workshop where we spend much time. We bring CDs from the living room and play them there using a PC based media center. The PC automatically rips CDs to the network when it plays them the first time. From there on we can stream the songs from either the workshop where we ripped them or from anywhere else in the house where we have a media streamer or a computer. The setup we are looking for is one where we can rip CDs at either location and preferably control playback from a computer as well as from the media streamer. A few of the devices mentioned in this blog actually supports this. Mmhhh…

My apologies for the tacky title.

Thomas Nielsen

June 14, 2008

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Causeries

Around the boxes

I think I should mention the idea behind the blue bars and the orange boxes. Let’s take the last ones first. They have no meaning. There; I said it. They are there simply to give a quick overview of a small selection of key features.

The blue ones are slightly more meaningful but that does not mean that you should go out and buy the ones that have a blue box on the right and ignore the ones with a box on the left. They do not signify quality! In my vocabulary quality is a measure of the extent to which one’s expectations are met – and that is exactly what they are – expectations.

Let us take an example. If you go to the store and grab a Linn Klimax and put it in your kitchen to have music while you cook, you are pretty likely to be disappointed and have very little table space to chop onions. If, however, you get yourself a Freecom MusicPal, you will propably find it somewhat easier to fit with your knife rack. The first one is a far right and the latter a far left.

Thomas Nielsen

June 14, 2008

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Bel Canto e.One Dac3

belcfront One of my favourite Shakespeare one liners [the better part of a verse, more like] is Juliet’s immortal outburst at Romeo; that had he been the nephew of Sid Vicious himself, he would have still been her one and only fancy… or as she put it: “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. It is obvious that John Stronczer, the chief at Bel Canto, had the core of this quote in mind when naming this DAC. Fortunately they omitted the name from the front – it looks extraordinarily slick in its purist attire.

belcback

Like the [near half priced] Benchmark DAC1 it sports a serious back panel with balanced XLR outputs. Specs tout a a 130dB dynamic range and an optimised and unbroken signal path without capacitors. The actual conversion is done with Burr-Brown PCM1792. The 5 inputs include USB next to the mandatory SPDIF and Toslink.

For an actual review, I strongly suggest you take a look at Stereophile’s article from last November.

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Freecom MusicPal

With their MusicPal internet radio, Freecom shows a fairly classy looking albeit, barebone device. Like the Terratec Noxon, it is designed to stream internet radio stations, music from your computer or from a network attached disk. It supports Wav, WMA and MP3, and recognizes uPnP servers on the network. It has both wired and wireless network connectivity and outputs both to headphones and music system.

There are two things that makes the MusicPal stand out from the crowd, though. It can show RSS feeds on its small LCD screen and, what is really nifty, it has a built in alarm clock… you can actually use it to wake up in the morning with your favourite artist – figuratively speaking.

There is no support for Flac or Ogg-Vorbis.

Freecom

Thomas Nielsen

June 10, 2008

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Colorado vNet Vibe Audio System

This is an awsome implementation of a dead simple concept. The Vibe Audio System consists of a media server with ripping capabilities. Depending on model, the server can handle 3 or 6 concurrent streams and thus serve 3 or 6 independent clients. The clever bit is the peripherals that all connect over ethernet. That includes an iPod dock, an AM/FM radio tuner, an analogue source decoder [complete with IR relaying] and a amplifier with a 7” touchscreen panel. Add to that software that installs on PCs in the network, letting you manage playlists and content, and you have a fairly impressive system.

wiring-diagram-vibe

There is nothing fancy about the specs; suffice to say that streams are uncompressed PCM and the only supported file format is WAV. But it is not specs that should propel this device into legend – it is sheer interconnectivity elegance. It even rack mounts if you so choose.

As for the amplifiers they appear a bit crammed in their wall flush mounts; but man, do I love the appearance.

What I miss most in the specs is not surprisingly Flac support. It could have helped save a bit of disk space but at least it uses PCM over MP3.

Colorado vNet

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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.