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Crestron ADMS

ADMS Someone at Crestron has nimbly avoided being called narrow minded for quite some time to come, hacking together this truly massive beast of features galore. Okay, it serves media; not just music but video as well. Video from DVD or Blu-ray as well as downloaded rentals. All this in full HD and 7.1 surround sound into 3 zones. Sound is served in a resolution of up to 24bit/96KHz and practically all formats known to man have been squeezed in.

Like all things Crestron, the ADMS can be operated from their control panels that also operate their home automation systems. The ADMS supports up to 1TB of RAID storage as well as NAS. It has Firewire, USB, S/PDIF, MMC and HDMI on the digital side of things, and a bunch of analogue ins and outs. All in an everything but discrete package.

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Logitech Squeezebox Boom

Adding to their Squeezebox line-up, Logitech has recently released their Squeezebox Boom. It uses the same technology as the Squeezebox Duet, in fact it can be controlled from the same remote and be a part of a system. Not entirely unlike the Sonos players that also come in a line-out unamplified version and one with a 50W power stage. The Squeezebox Boom just adds a pair of built-in speakers to make it an autonomous unit.

With specs like its sister device, sound quality is only limited to the quality of the amplifier and the miniscule speakers which, incidentally, sound incredibly good for their size. There is a 7-day alarm clock [with a built-in snooze button, no less] and automatic dimming of the display, making this perfect for a bedroom setup.

First impressions are that of a solid device. It is heavy and feels rather rugged in its rubbery front panel covering and shiny cabinet. Buttons operate smoothly and the remote, however small, feels good even in large hands and has quite a good reach. The display may seem old fashioned but the fact is that this type of Nixie-look-a-like display works very well in a dimly lit room, where color LCDs have a tendency to be overly bright. In addition to the ever present Squeezebox controls, the front panel offers 6 preset buttons that can be programmed directly from the device or from a Squeezebox Server using the KidsPlay plugin. Using this plugin gives you an almost unbelievable amount of programming options, such as (but all but limited to) choosing a random mix of tracks of a given genre while showing a brief message on the display as to which genre that is while clearing previous playlist selections. Nice, eh? In fact, it is difficult not to fiddle.

Should you need to, the Squeezebox Boom can be mounted in several positions with an optional L-bracket.

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Avoca VIP Music Edition

Avoca The Avoca VIP Music Edition sports some pretty nice specs in a pretty case accompanied by a slightly less pretty PDA based controller. The media center rips CDs to Flac onto an internal disk, optionally mirrored, and serves files at up to 24bit/192KHz resolution depending on your choice of output, although it appears to support only 96KHz sampling rates, possibly upscaling from there. Could be a spec glitch, though.

One of the more curious aspects of the Avoca is the controller. You get to point and click your way through your music selection but that is not all; you can actually talk to your music system. Now how about that? “Hey! Turn down that racket, son! – Can’t hardly hear myself think!”… and sonny boy can rebel all he likes.

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Firestone Audio Fubar II USB & Spitfire DACs

The Firestone Audio line of products is a refreshing attack on the design style of Hi-Fi equipment – not unlike the world of downhill mountain biking [the world is split into four distinct elements: peat, dirt, sight and sound]. Within the scope of this blog, two Firestone Audio products are particularly interesting: The Firestone Audio Fubar II USB DAC and the Firestone Audio Spitfire DAC. The former comes in a choice of bright red or grey and the latter just in grey.

The Fubar II is particularly useful as an external sound card for a PC, sporting a direct USB input as well as Toslink and coaxial inputs, all for a 16bit/48KHz conversion. Big brother Spitfire does not have a USB port but does offer a highly relieving bandaid in the form of a maximum resolution of 24bit/96KHz sampling rate. That makes the Spitfire a brilliant part of a chain starting with 2L’s hiRes Flac downloads.

Incidentally, there is also a Fubar III which has a built-in headphone amplifier.

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This bird is flying

Hans Peter L'Orange and Morten Lindberg of Lindberg Lyd Norwegian recording and music production company Lindberg Lyd AS has expanded their online music store 2L to include 24bit Flac downloads as well – for the time being limited to a few selected albums. Their recording catalogue includes some rather impressive works and I simply cannot wait for them to be available in high resolution format for download. Albums can be downloaded in both stereo or 5.1 multi channel, either way in full 24bit/96KHz.

In their HiRes Download Test Bench, you can download individual tracks in several formats to judge recording quality, format performance or simply enjoy some wonderful music. Either way, expect some rather hefty file sizes that are just waiting to be thrown at a nice media streamer. Bon appetit!

By the way! 2L were responsible for releasing the world’s first Blu-ray music disc in May of this year featuring TrondheimSolistene playing 4 works at a blistering 24bit/192KHz resolution in stereo and in 5.1 surround. Slightly off topic but interesting nonetheless.

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Pioneer PDX-Z9 SACD Receiver

[prodccat level=4 cd=1 flac=1 digital=1 upnp=1]

PDX-Z9 Pioneer have outdone themselves mating purist zen like styling and an outstanding feature set in this new SACD receiver. SACD receivers are not exactly one by the dozen in the first place and one that can receive audio streams certainly less so; not mentioning that it supports Flac albeit not the wildest of surprises since, after all, this is a SACD player. With a continuous 40W at 4Ω it is definitely no power station but it appears that Pioneer are signaling a new digital world order with this nice little device. They do have a new surround beast called SC-LX90 that does roughly the same as the PDX-Z9, only its 5 extraneous channels has caused some rather severe swelling, drastically impairing the zen stuff.

By the way, what is it with these product names? Do you remember Franquin’s comic series Spirou et Fantasio? Z comme Zorglub anyone? Ring a bell?

Pioneer

Thomas Nielsen

July 28, 2008

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Music for Life

Ian Shaw …is what Linn label tag their record label. Some bold statement if you ask me but browsing their releases does indeed reveal some interesting recordings that would be nice candidates for that proverbial desert island you might end up on carrying only a record and an audio system, particularly SACD but also some more curious formats; not only can you buy Flac encoded downloadables, you can even buy complete NAS drives preloaded with with every single Linn recording available. One such drive is a 2TB QNap. Now, that is service – and novel. But for those of us less susceptible to quantity bargains there is still the option to download the records or individual tracks. One such album is Ian Shaw’s Lifejacket. Quite an interesting album slightly [remotely perhaps] reminiscent of a quirky fusion between Jethro Tull and Curtis Stigers, only much more lively. There are indeed some nice recordings there.

I already mentioned B&W Music Club where you can subscribe to special recordings from Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records. Linn’s initiative is rather of the same substance and just as focused on musical fidelity. Linn have won numerous critical acclamations over the years for their records – they too offer lossless downloads both in 16bit CD quality and 24bit studio master resolution. Needless to say, I am tempted to say – and thus do.

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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

Thomas Nielsen

June 27, 2008

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Pinnacle Audio athenaeum

athenaeum I 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?

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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!

Real World Records

B&W

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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.