Category Archives: Lossless

Copenhagen Records offers 24-bit lossless

Danish record company Copenhagen Records announced 30th June that they will offer their releases in 16-bit and 24-bit lossless resolution. Which sample rates will be available, however, they do not reveal. Presumably 44.1KHz is what they mean when they say CD-quality. Master-quality would then likely be 96KHz or perhaps even 192KHz. Their ambitions, though, are much more well defined: They intend to offer their coming releases as 24-bit – directly off of the master. File formats are Apple Lossless, WMA and Flac.

Copenhagen Records already sell CD-quality 16-bit  WMA and Apple Lossless covering most of their backlist. What the new formats are concerned, so far only Nephew’s new album Danmark Denmark is available as 24-bit master quality. A brilliant band so perhaps I will just buy this album as Flac and tell you what rate it is.

Copenhagen Records Copenhagen Records

NaimUniti

Naim have always been associated with extreme high end and baffled the world not long ago when they extended their product line to Bentley in-car hifi with KW-fed 11 speaker extravaganza and a price tag to fit the car. Well, none of that. Now Naim went out and did an all-in-one package for the home sporting some rather nice specs and a compactness leaving little else to be desired.

Naim Uniti The NaimUniti is a 50W integrated FM/DAB receiver with built-in CD transport and internet connectivity. It accepts USB devices, controls an iPod, reads CD-R discs and streams music from the network, including internet radio stations. Ogg Vorbis and Flac are supported as is Apple Lossless. On the input side there are 5 digital and 4 analogue. The latter including one specifically for the Naim Stageline phono stage for all that vinyl screaming for attention and so often forgotten in other solutions.

Naim Naim

PS Audio PerfectWave Transport Memory Player

psaudio PS Audio are the people who gave us internet attached power conditioning so it is no surprise that they are the first to unveil a HRx capable player [almost like being a fax machine pioneer]. As so many other things on this blog it really doesn’t belong here, but it has one redeeming feature making it somehow fit in rather snuggly: It rips, stores and plays, and it connects to the internet.

First the old stuff. The perfectWave Transport rips the CD using the venerable Exact Audio Copy and stores it internally. Then the data is read back and played. This should eliminate timing related jitter by ways of simple buffering. While this idea itself is pretty obvious it wasn’t until Genesis released their Digital Lens in the mid-nineties it started to cost money acquired its flock of followers. Add to this a vendor driven service for downloading album artwork and song lyrics, more or less aptly buzzing it as cloud computing, you have a quite interesting CD transport.

Now the new stuff. The new player now supports the HRx formatted media. Not in itself an audio standard but simply a DVD with WAV files on it at a resolution of 24bit at 176.4KHz.

PS Audio PS Audio

Qsonix Q110 Digital Music Management System


Qsonix Q110

Behind a very long name lies a sleek, if somewhat conservative looking music server split in two – a desktop chassis with a CD-drive and a 15” or 17” touch screen. It supports 4 distinct zones that can be controlled separately, either from the touch screen or from a 3rd party remote [presumably via uPnP]. The server comes in 4 flavours from 250GB to 1.5TB. Files can be stored in lossless format and there is a digital output for attaching an external DAC at a resolution of up to 24bit/192KHz.

From the more unusual side of the feature set, we find not only CD burning but downscaling for iPod playlists and direct purchasing and download from Music Giants at full resolution. Not to mention the ability to play 1-second samples of arbitrary songs without interrupting whatever else is playing [except, of course, for the played sound sample].

Qsonix Qsonix

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.

Avoca Semiconductor Avoca Semiconductor

The Cullen Sonos mod

Reclocker Behind the curious title, lies the modification of the jitter in the original device by replacing the clock circuit and adding buffering. Reportedly this mod, which roughly doubles the price of your Sonos Zone Player, reduces jitter dramatically and makes the player a perfect source for a high-end DAC, effectively combining a WAF* bordering on the unbelievable with audiophile geekiness.

Incidentally; the company is not affiliated with Sonos despite its name-likeness with Sonos founder Thomas Cullen.

Cullen Circuits Cullen Circuits

*An apparently misspelled acronym reading: Spouse Acceptance Factor.

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.

2L 2L
Hi-Rez Test Bench Hi-Rez Test Bench

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 Pioneer

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.

Linn Records Linn Records

Sony NAS-SC55PKE

sonynas This is a complete system with zone system serving up to 5 rooms, ripping from CD and lossless streaming [LPCM, not Flac]. But like the Arcam or the Colorado vNet and unlike practically everybody else, this thing supports recording and streaming of analogue sources. Damn that is cool! It even support finger print recognition of analogue sources making it possible to tag tracks. Other strange analysis features include a 12 tone analysis-gizmo which can distinguish between talk and music. I wonder where the line is drawn between rap and sports commentary? Not to mention why you need to distinguish?

One thing that makes this device stand out, however, is what appears to be support for runtime conversion – the very thing I have asked for. It can publish tracks to a USB device. Since it can save tracks in LPCM when ripping and the publishing appears to be unconditional this must be the conclusion. Well done!

It has an FM radio and in some versions a DAB. The device supports recording from all sources onto the harddisk and can do it at set times.

The NAS-SC55PKE is the bigger brother in a duet of devices, with a heavily crippled smaller sibling. Big brother comes with a wireless client so you will have something to stream to. I shall refrain from mentioning the speakers that come with system.

Sony Sony

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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