Network and Music Server Products: CES 2009
Network and Music Server Products
(Editor's Note: The following is excerpted from SS's CES Report. The full report will appear in the upcoming issue of "The Absolute Sound.")
Blue Smoke’s Black Box offers a different approach to networked music devices. It can read and “rip” a disc into your system, but it doesn’t have a hard drive. Instead it sends the data stream to an existing networked hard drive. It can handle up to 192/24 files and sports one S/PDIF input and both S/PDIF and AES/EBU outputs. The Black Box is designed to interface with an external DAC (it was hooked up to an MSB DAC for the show) and is an “open system,” so it will work with both iTunes or Windows-based music systems. The base unit with a keyboard lists for $6995 (it also needs a screen), and delivery will be at the end of the first quarter 2009.
Olive displayed a prototype of its new flagship product, the Opus Nº 6 (see photo below). It features independently and separately grounded multi-regulated power supplies for its analog and digital stages and uses a TI SRC194 asynchronous sample rate converter. Along with all this cutting-edge hardware, the Opus Nº 6 sports a very intuitive yet powerful user interface. Projected price will be between $3k and $4k, and delivery will be in the summer of 2009.
The Letter N was well represented with new music server products from both Naim and NuForce. The Naim HDX 4 has been further refined and supports up to 192/24 music files which are stored on its internal 400GB hard drive. The NuForce unit employs four unique databases to search for metadata so that 95% of all commercial classical releases are recognized when you rip them to your hard drive. It also has twelve distinct fields that you can search for classical music. The Nuforce unit will be available in the US beginning in February with a base price of $2500.
The Italian company Blacknote (distributed by Koetsu USA) showed the DSS-30, a server than supports up to 192/24 files and can handle Apple lossless format. It also reads CD ISO files and can update itself automatically from an Internet-connected network. Priced at $2800 with a solid-state analog output stage and $4400 for a tubed version, the DSS-30 appears to be a bargain.
Weiss, who’s established its reputation in the pro world with its FireWire DACs, showed a prototype network player called Roma. It’s PC-based but needs no internal cooling fans. It will support automated CD ripping as well as remote operation through iPhone or iPod Touch. Still in the early prototype stage Weiss hopes to have a finished version by summer 2009.
All content, design, and layout are Copyright © 1999 - 2011 NextScreen. All Rights Reserved.
Reproduction in whole or part in any form or medium without specific written permission is prohibited.
Reproduction in whole or part in any form or medium without specific written permission is prohibited.
Comments
It will be interesting to see if high-end servers take hold. They certainly represent a convenience bonus over the uber-geek Squeezebox and its kin. But the challenge will be to support these kinds of price tags! As you consider these technologies in the future, I'd love to see you establish a common baseline, to help us understand their audible strengths and weaknesses. Whatever their convenience benefits, for the true music lover, they must be judged on sonic criteria.
The Logitech Transporter might represent a good baseline against which to compare sonic performance. It will do high-rez duty as well as redbook standard, and at $2,000 represents a dividing line between the serious and the pedestrian. And you've already reviewed it...
As these new server products hit the review stream, please consider these tradeoffs. In particular, music servers bring new challenges to quality. For instance:
1. How are gigabites worth of high-rez downloads going to be backed up so when your 4-year old hard drive fails, you don't lose all your music?
2. In theory, wireless G should represent plenty of bandwith for ANY audio application, yet users describe sonic benefits to hard-wired ethernet connections. What functions are best in which boxes & how should they be combined? Ripping (on computer?). Storage (on server?) DAC (in the audio rack? in the speakers?).
3. Must we all live with computers in our music rooms? Given computers' propensity to spew out RF frequencies and generate power-line noise, what will this mean for the rest of our gear?
4. What should be digital and what should be analog? Should we follow the Meridian approach and stay in the digital domain right up until the speakers? What is the best place for analog conversion to occur? This has huge implications for the high-end audio systems of the future!
5. Does this mean that there will be a new market for high-quality A/D converters so that our analog turntables will play through these systems without loss of quality? Is this even possible? Certainly commercial A/D units are available, and zillions of garage bands use inexpensive digitization to record their works to Macs & PC's. But where are the high-end A/D units?
6. Given software approaches for "perfect" bit-for-bit copies, is there any future for CD Transports? Are there important artifacts of HDD playback that we have not yet identified that might limit their quality? How fast must the drive be? What kind of error checking and cache size must it have? Will ordinary hard drives be supplanted by music-specific optimized drives?
I'm certain there are many additional issues yet to surface. But it certainly represents an interesting new audio technology!
Thanks for covering it and I look forward to reviews to come.
DF