The Roon Music Server ($119 for a one-year subscription, $499 for life) is a flashy and fascinating product with a good bloodline. The minds behind it developed the Sooloos Music Server System, which became the Meridian Sooloos and blew many of our minds. I've played with the Roon software on and off since its release in 2015, but found it unintuitive in many ways. That surprised me—I'd thought that the original Sooloos system was the epitome of logical and intuitive operation. But the world of music streaming has changed. Our…
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Kalman Rubinson previewed Roon 1.3 in July 2017 (Vol.40 No.7):
Friday June 30, 4pm until late, Toronto dealer Angie's Audio Corner/American Sound of Canada (12261 Yonge Street, Richmond Hill, ON L4E 3M7, Canada) is holding its 5th Annual Party.
We have lots to celebrate, says Angie:
5 years in the store's corner location with the newly remodeled annex.
40 years for Angie in the audio industry and still loving it.
60 years. Yes, Angie is now 60 years old, but still doing what she loves and having fun.
4 years: Stella, Angie's dog, turns 4 this month.
150 years for Canada—Happy Canada Day.
There…
It has been said that the high-end audio industry has a weakness which perversely has also helped to maintain its growth. The evolutionary process whereby designs are improved, upgraded, and supplanted at regular intervals keeps everyone interested, and of course affords reviewers useful employment. On the other hand, once a purchase has been made there may be resentment on the part of owners who find that, by the time their choice has become established and awarded sufficient review recommendation, a product upgrade is already in the pipeline.
Announcements of such improvements are…
It's been going on for a while now: Despite support for multichannel in audio/video receivers and A/V processors priced from as little as $200 to $30,000, there are still very few offerings that cater to the music listener. They may offer stereo-only streaming features through their USB or Ethernet inputs, but these inputs don't see your multichannel files. To handle such files, they would require you to add a music server with HDMI output. However, I know of no turnkey music servers that will output multichannel audio via HDMI. Sure, servers based on PCs and Macs will output lossless, high-…
Because the e38's competitors in the consumer market for multichannel DACs are more limited in their capabilities (miniDSP), more expensive (NADAC+), or more cumbersome (eg, a stack of three Mytek DACs), for me, the exaSound really has no competition. Sure, some will cavil at the lack of support for DSD512 or higher, but as yet there is no source material for those resolutions, and in my opinion, upsampling to them isn't worth the effort. The exaSound e38 is not so much revolutionary—it doesn't need to be—as it is an expression of the applicable state-of-the-art and a valid and valuable…
Sidebar 1: Contacts
Fidelizer. Web: www.fidelizer-audio.com
exaSound Audio Design, 3219 Yonge Street, Suite 354, Toronto, Ontario M4N 3S1, Canada. Web: www.exasound.com
Baetis Audio, 428 Canyon Creek Road, Livingston, MT 59047. Tel: (514) 496-9933. Web: www.baetisaudio.com
Sidebar 2: Recordings in the Round
Langgaard: Music of the Spheres, At the End of Time, From the Deep
Inger Dam-Jensen, soprano; Hetna Regitze Bruun, mezzo-soprano; Peter Lodahl, tenor; Johan Reuter, bass; Danish National Concert Choir & Vocal Ensemble & Symphony Orchestra; Thomas Dausgaard, conductor
DaCapo 6.220535 (SACD/CD). 2010. TT: 72
This recording was released in 2010, but I was reminded of it when I discovered the even older recording of Rued Langgaard's Messis (2 SACD/CDs, DaCapo 6.220528-29). That and his opera Antikrist, also recorded by the…
Before the Los Angeles Audio Show, I spent a few days in southern California, and was able to schedule a visit to AudioQuest's massive facility in Irvine. In this video, Bryan Long (VP Operations), accompanied by Joe Harley's dog Pumpkin, gives a condensed version of his usual tour, which is normally well over an hour.
This is a time-lapse of a pair of AudioQuest Rocket 33 speaker cables being made. In real time, the process took nearly 30 minutes; this version is accelerated by 730%, and is very satisfying to watch (for me, at least). We hope to capture more components being…
Imagine almost 86 minutes of superbly recorded percussion in which the traditional notions of steady beat, driving rhythms, and attention-catching melody rarely take center stage. Welcome to Beyond, a mind-bending /time-distorting three-disc percussion tour de force from Sono Luminus on which the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet plays a dazzling array of percussion as it explores the eloquence and beauty of color, texture, sustain and decay.
Recorded in DXD (24/352.8k), Beyond is available as either a hi-rez download in multiple formats, including DSD, or as a three-disc album that includes…
Bit-perfect playback of multichannel files at all bitrates up to 24/352.8 PCM or DSD256 was just fine. When I asked the Nucleus+ to downsample 24/352.8 to 24/192 or DSD256 to DS64, as one might do to accommodate a particular DAC, I got messages ranging from "2x" to "4x," indicating that it had little in reserve. Upsampling, too, seemed to drain the tank, more with upsampling from DSD to DSD256 than from 44.1/48kHz to 192kHz PCM. Upsampling from 44.1kHz PCM to DSD256 was just managed as continuous play, with a headroom indication of just under "2x," but 48kHz PCM to DSD256 was unstable, with…