Devialet D-Premier


Conditionnement DevialetThis Fritz Langian breathe-on-it-and-it-tranfers-your-brain digital amplifier and world-domination-in-a-chrome-box, is simply the most awe inspiring piece of hi-fi equipment I have seen in a long time. Inside a sleek chrome box, it harbors 240 watts of weird class A and D combinatrix, 24-bit/192KHz DAC, SD card reader, wifi connectivity and streaming over network. And that is not all… look at that remote. I know a remote has fairly little to do with soundstage and transparency; but look at it! Is that cool or what?!

Outputs include XLR and HDMI, and they are routable (!). On the input side it goes novel even more by including a programmable phono stage to satisfy most, if not all but the most pernickety, vinyl lovers. What can I say? I want one!

Devialet Devialet

Marantz NA7004


NA7004Marantz for me always stood for good old conservative ways and champagne colored aluminium bezels. Never as a technology frontloader. Perhaps that is the reason why they had me on this one. I didn’t see it coming.

Last year Marantz released the NA7004, which by a quick glance looks like any other Marantz component. But it ain’t! Under the hood lurks a three piece DAC, audio streaming and that all too rare Flac support. The NA7004 will discover DLNA compatible servers and play your music as the audio gods intended. It interconnects with other Marantz components and boasts a well laid out front. And HD? Well, it goes aaaalll the way pal.

Marantz Marantz

Olive O6HD

o6hd_silver_front_angleOlive has been on the media streamer market for the better part of the market’s existence, yet hasn’t made much noise. Their latest initiative could be here to change that: The world’s first HD Audiophile Server. That is what they call it and looking at the specs, it’s definitely the world’s first something, even if others have touched on this before. The Linn DS is definitely up there (with a slightly more rabid price tag) and so is the NaimUniti Serve. The latter being a really attractive setup in its family configuration of server, players and mini players.

The device itself is cool if not exactly novel. The design is like other Olives, slightly unusual and definitely not very shelf-friendly.  The slanted cabinet has a touch screen on top and a handful of heavy duty connectors on the back. The front has a slot for ripping CDs. To get you going, the O6HD comes pre-installed with 12 HD tracks from Chesky records. Hand-built in America and all, it will look good on a serving table or something.

The power supply is split into two, to feed analog and digital circuits with each their own chill filtered juice. The DACs are 24-bit Burr-Brown PCM1792 supporting high resolution conversion of 24-bit/192KHz. It comes with 2TB of storage, letting you rip quite a bit of CDs, at least in 16-bit resolution. At full resolution it is not one byte too much. Unfortunately the CD transport is just that. A CD drive. It doesn’t support DVD or SACD so the only option for actually getting any HD content is to rip it elsewhere or download HD tracks.

A rather cool feature is genre specific tags. Only information pertaining to the specific type of music is shown in the genre navigation. That is really good news for classical music connoisseurs. Add to that a bit of color coding and a bloody nice glass touch screen, and you have a pretty nifty dashboard. The ever present iPhone / iPod Touch remote isn’t missing either.

Linn DS does Apple

kinskydesktopThe latest upgrade for KinskyDesktop, the remote software for Linn DS, now works with Mac as well as Windows and additionally lets you play music from your iTunes libraries on your Linn DS. At the same time the Linn DS itself now supports Ogg Vorbis files in addition to the Flac support mandatory in these high-end circles. Where exactly iTunes fit in in these same circles, is an entirely different discussion: We have a music library consisting of thousands of Flac’ed CDs, a decent collection of native HD Flac files and a good handful of records bought through iTunes. As I see it, there are only two scenarios that warrant iTunes support in the Linn DS and that is if you rippped your entire collection with iTunes and don’t want to go through it again or if you bought the occasional CD in Apple’s music store. The first scenario is perfectly understandable. Re-ripping an entire collection is a daunting task and if the CDs are Red Book and saved as Apple Lossless, sound quality is unscathed anyway. It is merely a matter of convenience. Music bought through iTunes is DRM protected and will not play on the Linn anyway.

Now we really need Apple to get their fingers out and add support for 24-bit HD music so our Linns can have a something of proper nutritional value. It is, after all, at this elevation in the hifi-pyramid that Linn makes a difference.

Linn Linn

Bang & Olufsen Beosound 8


bosound8Bang & Olufsen has joined the iPod dock wagon and done it in as much style as one has come to expect. Equally expectable is the lack of vision in as much as the Beosound 8 does not support wireless audio streaming. Instead Bang & Olufsen relies on external devices for streaming, such as the Apple Airport (which they explicitly mention) or presumably anything with a Toslink connector such as Logitech Squeezebox.

A bit more novel is that support for Apple’s iPad. Anything Apple will fit in the connector. Drop in an iPad and you have yourself a pretty nice transistor radio with room adapting sound processing. Nice. Less nice, of course, is the fact that anything not Apple, is pretty much left out to dry.

As iPod docks go, this one looks good. Incredibly good, in fact. But iPod docks are legion. Did someone say “been there – done that”?

B&O B&O

Wireless iPod dock for Sonos


sonos-wireless-dock_w500Sonos today announced  a wireless dock for Apple iPod Touch and iPhone. The dock allows you to stream music from your iPod to Sonos devices across your home. Sonos already has an analog line-in that can be streamed. Adding the iPod lets you only wish for one extra thing and that is a streamable digital input. Couldn’t be far away, I am sure.

Sonos Sonos

Naim UnitiServe

UnitiServeWith the UnitiServe, British Naim completes their Unity system. The UnitiServe is a Windows XP Embedded based media server with a built in Red Book CD drive. The server supports a multitude of audio formats, including Flac at a resolution of up to 24bit/192KHz. The innards include parts from equally cool British lads, Digital Fidelity.

The main idea, of course, is for the UnitiServe to act as a server for multitude of NaimUniti and UnitiQute clients already casually spread across your house. It supports streaming unique content to 6 simultaneous receivers. But being a full fledged DLNA server, it will do the biddings of any compliant device on your home network.

The UnitiServe comes with 1TB of disk space or, if you so prefer, with only a 16GB SSD disk, requiring a NAS for its data.

UnitiSystem

Naim Naim

Shoe horning a Sooloos

joesixsooloosSince hardware vendors seem reluctant to put new stuff on the street at the moment, it is refreshing to see how audiophiles can help themselves. Chris Connaker of Computer Audiophile saw a parallel between the stunning Sooloos media controller and a humble Dell multi touch computer monitor. In his blog he explains how tweaking and poking, he fused a computer, the J. River Media Center and a Dell monitor into a home grown and very shiny Sooloos clone. As he himself readily admits, the Sooloos is of another world and not quite replicable. The idea, however, of having an easily navigable media center composed of off-the-shelf parts, is just plain wonderful in all its simplicity.

We have tried something similar ourselves, using an earlier generation resistive single touch monitor and Foobar2000. The problem with this setup was mostly lack of screen real estate, making an on-screen keyboard hard to use, and lack of slide response; it was just not easy to scroll. A better touch monitor, such as the Dell SX2210T used here, would have helped quite a bit. Another issue we had was lack of multi room support. This issue is present with the Sooloos clone too. With iTunes you can use Airports and have real time control of other rooms. The rigid implementation and lack of HD support makes iTunes an unattractive solution, though.

While we stuck with a good-quality-but-no-thrills soundcard, there are some high-end solutions that can make such a setup sound incredible.

Computer Audiophile Computer Audiophile

HP Dreamscreen

hpdream 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.

HP HP

* Possibly due to its Pandora support the HP Dreamscreen is not available in Europe. A pity considering its other properties.

Naim UnitiQute

NaimQute 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.

Naim Naim

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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