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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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!
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.
I do prefer Flac over other compressed audio formats. Over any audio format , in fact. A standard audio CD is encoded in PCM which is, if you like, a raw stream of digital information. MP3 and Ogg-Vorbis compress this stream by transforming the stream into something perceivably the same as the original but not quite. The higher the compression the further away from the original we get. It is actually possible to perform a surprisingly radical compression with little loss in sound quality. The problem, of course, is that someone has to decide what is perceivably the same – for most ears are different when it all comes down to it and what is worse – once you notice the difference, your perception has been forever altered. This is where the lossless compressions come to play their part. Instead of removing or altering information, the stream is compressed pretty much like a Zip file, only optimized for audio and more importantly; inherently so.
Flac supports samples resolutions of up to 32 bit. For more trivia, please visit the Flac homepage.
For those who have never tried this little experiment, this is what you should do… find a good CD in your collection, preferably one that does not have a compressed sound tapestry quality to it – you know; Phil Spector. Rip the CD to MP3 and then listen to a song in either format, one after another. If you can’t tell the difference, there is no need shopping for Flac capable equipment unless it offers you some other needful feature. If, on the other hand, you do hear a difference, you will be forever addicted to lossless encoding [*]. It should be noted, that not many people can tell the difference if you rip at a bitrate of 320Kbps and most that I know of rip at 192Kbps– so don’t be disheartened if you don’t feel the revelation just yet. But one day you will.
*I am relatively certain that you cannot sue.
Esteemed Arcus has a potent player in the game of CD ripping audio servers. This one can copy CD onto its internal hard drive, back it up onto a network attached storage and play it back in a number of formats, including Flac and Ogg-Vorbis.
Wireless communication is done using a USB Wifi dongle. Not exactly elegant but at least it lets you move the antenna to higher ground for good reception. Identifying itself over uPnP, other streaming clients can take advantage of the device.
This is a clever device, in that it detaches navigation from the device completely and uses only the remote. The remote control has a small color LCD display which shows everything from playlists to album cover artwork. More Squeezeboxes can be linked together between rooms and either play different tracks or in-sync.
Just like with the Transporter, Logitech-owned Slim Devices once more shows true excellence in spec writing. One thing, however, they managed to keep somewhat hidden, is the fact that the Duet [unlike the Transporter] only supports streaming from their own SqueezeCenter server software. You cannot, in other words, stream from just any media enabled NAS disk or directly from a file server.
Like its bigger brother it supports Flac and Ogg-Vorbis. Indeed a neat device, even considering its obvious short coming.
 |
Barebone device | |
 |
Cheap good featured | |
 |
Actual hi-fi device | |
 |
High end hi-fi | |
 |
Out of this world | |
 CD drive |
 Wifi |
|
 Flac audio |
 Digital IO |
|
 Ogg-Vorbis |
 uPnP support |
|
 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.
Copyright © 2024. Powered by WordPress & Romangie Theme.
