What is happening!? Did all the hardware vendors go belly up in an obscure global depression or is the R&D world focusing on 3D television and scantily clad ladies to help sell the buggers? For several months nothing has happened in the land of the audio streamer. Yes! I want a NaimUnity. Yes! I think Sonos is cool. No, I don’t exactly have an ass full of dough to spend. But I do crave my weekly dose of hardware and these past 6 months have been a cold turkey. So, dear vendors: Please do get your guys out of those 3D labs and focus on some real value. We want nice sound… Okay?!
media|STREAMERS
The market for media hubs is difficult to navigate – I try to chart some waters here
Zzzzzzz…
Sony Bravia Monolithic Design
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HP Dreamscreen
The HP Dreamscreen is not an audio device per se but a good old fashioned picture frame with some unusual features.
As a picture frame it is rather above par in terms of picture quality and how it presents photos. It can show images from one of several built-in card readers or stream them from in-house media servers and even from HP’s own Snapfish photo service via its internet connection. For reasons unknown, it cannot stream video. That is somewhat odd since video playback is very, very good. The screen has an exceptionally wide viewing angle and very little ghosting. It comes with a handy little remote that can be parked in a small pocket behind the screen and hidden on-frame controls that light up when you touch it. Apart from getting greasy the screen itself does not have any touch capabilities.
What qualifies it for this short mention is not the fact that it shows your Facebook pals and all their weird ass twips to the world but the fact that it streams in-house MP3 music as well as internet radio stations and even Pandora*. Sound quality is next to hilarious but stick a pair of decent computer speakers in its headphone jack and you have yourself a nifty kitchen aid that gladly plays your favorite radio station while tickering your bestest friends’ updates. Or do as we do; export your own favorite Gumbo and Tamales recipes to a 4×3 image format and save them in a photo stream.
* Possibly due to its Pandora support the HP Dreamscreen is not available in Europe. A pity considering its other properties.
Naim UnitiQute
The people who gave us the NaimUnity last year have gone and done it again. This time with a cute little device aptly and cleverly named The UnitiQute. The main difference from the NaimUnity is the absence of a CD transport. In other words, the UnitiQute is for those who don’t care about perloid plastic discs or those who have a plenty of sound elsewhere and needs an extension.
The front is sleek and minimalistic and very Naim. The back panel abundant with connectors for all things digital and a few analogue for good measure. The UnitiQute streams from internet radio stations and from network storage devices, be it a regular NAS or that equally sleek Naim HDX in the living room. In addition to networked music, the UnitiQute plays music from attached devices, such as iPods and USB harddrives.
Flac support of up to 24bit/96KHz puts it well in the clear with the competition. With a built-in amplifier yielding 30W of smooth niceness it is fairly self contained and should fit any small living area. Put an HDX in the study with your Focals, a Unity in the living room and a Qute in the bed room and your retirement is pretty much secured.
Apple Airport Express
The Apple Airport Express is not new by a long shot, 6 years in fact, but it does sport a nice feature making it worth mentioning anyway, a feature I failed to mention when commenting on Apple TV: They act as a remote output through what Apple has aptly named Airtunes. You can select Airports and Apple TVs around the house when playing songs from iTunes and have them play through one or more simultaneously. What is more, it has a Toslink connector buried inside the miniscule output jack for a purely digital connection to your sound system, should it support it. Actually, the Toslink connector is much preferred over the analog output due to excessive and quite audible hum from the built-in power supply.
There are a few catches. You cannot kill a connection initiated by one computer from another, i.e. you cannot start your music from the computer in the office and then when you get to the kitchen, take a computer there and select another song. This can be a major hassle [to be very diplomatic] if you use more than a few computers. Also you are pretty much limited to playing music via iTunes. There are a few hacks out there allowing you to route sound from other applications to an Airport, such as Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba, but these tools are compromises. Particularly latency is a big issue, especially when watching video and routing the sound elsewhere. Applications competing for the Airtunes connection is another issue adding to the brew of annoyances. Having to manually kill a connection made by Airfoil to open one for iTunes is certainly not befitting my workflow.
Setting up an Airport is straight forward. With it comes a setup application that browses the network for Airports and lets you connect to whichever one you like and configure it. Should you have special needs in terms of authentication protocols or topologies it lets you handle that too, albeit considerably less elegantly.
The Apple Airport Express costs next to nothing so if you already use iTunes, this is a really cost efficient means to a distributed music system. Airtunes has some design flaws but works remarkably well considering.
Lossless audio explained
My favourite company and defacto curators of good sound, Bower & Wilkins, just published an article on their Society of Sound web site, explaining lossless audio in general and Flac in particular in what can only be described as kid’s stuff. One can argue whether digital sound distribution is difficult material, but I find it indisputable that the topic is notoriously hard to convey. It is this last bit I think B&W did better than anyone before them.
If you don’t know Flac, read it to get a non-technical explanation. If you do know the technicalities, read it anyway… if for nothing else, then to get an example of how to explain it yourself.
Danish High Fidelity shuts down
A beacon in the Danish hifi community has decided to turn off the lights. Dating back to 1971, High Fidelity was the pinnacle magazine from Forlaget Audio for many years. In 1997 the magazine was sold to its editors and now a poor financial foothold turns the final page.
Linn Majik DS-I
I may be pushing the icons above a bit on this one, since Linn has not yet disclosed anything specific on their new compact. Following in the footsteps of Naim and their Uniti, Linn has gone and committed a similar product. A complete unit, albeit sans the radio and the transport. Okay, so it isn’t a complete system. It does, however, appear that the Linn Majik DS-I has everything in the realm of in- and output. Even a phono input. All you need is a tuner for the BBC must-haves, a CD transport for the not-yet-ripped CDs and a pair of speakers that can receive the angel dust from the DS and sprinkle your abode with magic.
Bowers & Wilkins P5
British hi-fi deluxe company Bowers & Wilkins have spawned a first born of a new family of products – headphones. People have cried for years and begged for the mighty islanders to get on with it and build a pair. Now they have. Specs are sparse at the moment, as are all sorts of availability data. But the photos are portents of good things coming this way. Indeed.
Efforts has been put into verbatim sound reproduction instead of meaningless enhancements that could never fit two persons anyway, let alone thousands. The ear pads are semi-closed to allow some ambient sound to pass and covered in leather. The cable has an inline iPod remote control and, what is quite a rarity, the cable is user changeable. If that means that there is an optional remote-free cable is unclear but that would definitely be something to hope for.
Sonos ZonePlayer S5
Sonos have ruled the streaming kingdom seemingly for eternities now but have been subjected to more and more frequent bashings for stubbornly sticking to less than standalone-friendly ZonePlayers. In others words: Why don’t they make a real standalone player for the kitchen (or wherever this makes sense)? Now they have… The ZonePlayer S5 is one such thing. A monolithic heat fan from appearance; a well spec’ed transistor radio beneath.
Each driven by a D-class amplifier of unknown grandeur 5 drivers form the bessel. One of these is a 3½” center positioned subwoofer [remember 3½” floppy disks? Woof!]. Otherwise it appears to be spec’ed like its brethren ZonePlayers. Like these the S5 can be controlled by the dedicated CR100 or Cr200 controllers, or from a PC or an iPhone.
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Barebone device | |
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Cheap good featured | |
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Actual hi-fi device | |
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High end hi-fi | |
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Out of this world | |
 CD drive |
 Wifi |
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 Flac audio |
 Digital IO |
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 Ogg-Vorbis |
 uPnP support |
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 Video |
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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.
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