Kal Rubinson Inspecting the Black Box

Stereophile scribe Kal Rubinson examines the small forest of connections on the back of the Black Box.

COMMENTS
stu gatz's picture

It is like the Obelisk in 2001. What does it do? No one knows but it is a source of wonderment.

Peter's picture

The Black Box is simply put a Windows system designed from the ground up for audio, coupled with our own proprietary sound system (as opposed to an off-the-shelf sound-card) and software stack. We have designed the system solely for the reproduction of high-quality music at any resolution from 44.1kHz to 192kHz and from 16-bit to 32-bit. The case is an aluminum heat-sink with no moving parts inside. The motherboard, processor, and RAM have been implemented in such a way to minimize audio destroying heat and noise. The entire system pulls 35 watts at load.The audio system features I2S (MSB Network), BNC-SPDIF, AES/EBU, and Toslink as well as our own hardware upsampling (user-selectable) via switch on the back of the unit.We understand that there are a lot of questions about The Black Box and we are working to update our web-site to clear up any confusion about the operation of The Black Box, and apologize for any misunderstanding.

mark H's picture

Or buy an 600 DOLLAR mac and a decent DAC.

norbert's picture

What does snake oil smell like?

DawgByte's picture

It smells like a Black Box and all these other multi-thousand dollar music "servers". When I think of servers I think of a Dell PowerEdge R710, not a Black Box.

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