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Charlotte de Witte's Sanctum, my current techno obsession, was already spinning when I stepped into the Audio Note UK room. Sales executive Adrian Ford-Crush stood nearby; across the room, founder Peter Qvortrup—the company's resident iconoclast—paged through Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI, a scathing look at the environmental and ethical costs of artificial intelligence. But then the music took over, as it always does in this room.

Ford-Crush and Qvortrup played vinyl and CDs through an all-Audio Note system. It included a CDT Four CD transport ($21,119), a prototype DAC 5.…

Magico didn’t provide prices for most products, but the company’s Peter Mackay (pictured) estimated the system's cost at over $2 million. Center stage stood the 1000lb Magico M9s ($750,000/pair), powered by D’Agostino Relentless 800 monoblocks ($195,000/pair) for the woofers and Relentless Epic 1600 monoblocks ($349,500/pair) for the mids and highs. The scale of…

Though similar in many respects, with a very similar appearance, these two products—the ZENith Next-Gen and…

I have several terabytes of music stored on a Synology NAS. Connecting to my NAS proved trivial—simpler than with Roon. With Roon, you have to get the path exactly right, and every time I enter it, I find I've forgotten how. Sense guides you through the process, helping to locate your NAS. It works.

You can use the ZENith Next-Gen as a standalone device with the Sense app managing your library and playing your music. Or the ZENith can serve as an endpoint—which is to say, as a streamer controlled by another device; you could then use a separate Roon server, for example, while…

It has long been apparent that for some music consumers—those who lack at least modest proficiency with computers—maintaining a digital music library can be a daunting chore. If your library consists only of paid commercial downloads, you may not have a problem, because usually paid downloads have their metadata well-sorted: They should work fine in any system, with tracks collected together in an album and album art displayed. (If they don't, complain to the download service, though they'll probably blame it on the record label.)

But if,…

Description: Single-chassis server/streamer with 2TB "pSLC" SSD,1 Intel i7 processor with eight physical cores, 16GB DDR4 "industrial grade" RAM; "NGaN" gallium nitride–regulated power supply. Outputs: 3 USB 3.2 Gen2 capable of PCM up to 32/768, DSD up to DSD 256 by DoP, DSD 512 native. Optional output modules: PhoenixUSB Lite, PhoenixI2S Lite, S/PDIF (plus AES3, TosLink). Two RJ45 (Ethernet) inputs/outputs (one for LAN connection, the other for connection to a streamer or streaming DAC). USB output can also be used to connect a CD ripper, which rips to WAV or…

Digital sources: CH Precision C10 D/A converter and D1.5 transport; Innuos Statement streamer-server, Roon Nucleus One server.
Preamplification: Line: Pass Laboratories XP-32. Phono: Pass Labs XP-27, Sutherland Big Loco.
Power amplifiers: Pass Laboratories XA60.8 monoblocks.
Loudspeakers: Wilson Audio Specialties Alexx V.
Cables: Digital: AudioQuest Carbon USB; CAD USB; Wireworld Platinum Starlight 8 Ethernet. Interconnect: AudioQuest ThunderBird (XLR and RCA), Nordost Valhalla 2 XLR. Speaker: AudioQuest ThunderBird ZERO. Power: AudioQuest…

It was good to catch up with Eelco Grimm and John-Paul Lizars before sitting down to hear the Grimm Audio LS1c two-way active speaker system with SB1 motion-feedback subwoofer ($38,000–$44,150/pair, depending on finish and tariffs).

In the April issue of Stereophile, Rogier van Bakel praised these actives as among the least boxy speakers he’d had in his listening room. He noted their excellent off-axis response and transparency, and wrote that “there’s not a genre the Grimms couldn’t do justice to with their panache and lack of coloration . . . the whole painting is…