A $15k music streamer reviewed on stereophile

[eriksson]

Even the none technical crowd got some warning shots.

Jenkins, who was raised on Bizet, Puccini, Gershwin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and the Rolling Stones, spent several decades in the digital transmission, broadcasting, and telecommunications fields before he entered the hi-fi industry in 2004. He focused on cables at first and then turned to music servers.

[...][Antipodes] starts with audio design from the ground up. [...]



[...]The fundamental difference between our approach and what we see most of our competitors doing is that we approach everything from the ground up rather than applying Band-Aids after the event.[...]

[...]Instead of "starting with rubbish, we design from the ground up to minimize noise. Because of that, we can also maximize bandwidth."[...]

 

[voodooless]

Wow, this must be one of my most efficient posts ever at least in terms of my own contribution to it

 

[restorer-john]

Made in New Zealand, that's the ticket.

New Zealand gave the world Perreaux. Arguably the best MOSFET series of amplifiers ever built. From full professional to home HiFi.

I'd wager a PMF-5550 is likely a massive upgrade for anything you own, and it's 33 years old.

Bandwidth BTW is unity gain at 3MHz...

 

[Snoopy]

Stuff like this is why I will never care for vinyl , tubes, cables , power filters etc..

Now a streamer that sounds like a turntable.. oh boy.

 

[Geert]

I guess stereophile really has a thing for expensive streamers. They are the new “cables” of the industry.

Nice analogy. Everyone's focused on the device being reviewed by Stereophile, but streamers sounding different is a given in the subjective audiophile world.

 

[sq225917]

It is a given and its mostly total bullshit. Use the right dac with impeccable numbers and input isolation and you can throw almost any old shit at it. I have a pi server, a mbp as dedicated server and a 30 year old cd player, they all sound identical into my dac

 

[LTig]

New Zealand gave the world Perreaux. Arguably the best MOSFET series of amplifiers ever built. From full professional to home HiFi.

I'd wager a PMF-5550 is likely a massive upgrade for anything you own, and it's 33 years old.

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Bandwidth BTW is unity gain at 3MHz...

Must sound horrible with a SINAD of ~70 dB ... (SCNR)

 

[antcollinet]

Ok, I am bit drunk and lost track in this review. Before I buy one I want to know - does it have golden floating heatsinks?

 

[outlookrt]

Th Audio Industry: Creates this $15K Streamer.

Also the Audio Industry: "Why don't young people care about hi fidelity music reproduction anymore???????"

 

[pseudoid]

New Zealand gave the world Perreaux. Arguably the best MOSFET series of amplifiers ever built. From full professional to home HiFi.
I'd wager a PMF-5550 is likely a massive upgrade for anything you own, and it's 33 years old.
Bandwidth BTW is unity gain at 3MHz...

Jeeeeeessssus, Edith! That thing got more power than the brand new Panasonic microwave you just bought!
I recall we had a new-ish PMF2??? that left a nasty stench for months in the studio after an accidental meltdown and an essential techie dismissal.

 

[radix]

From the interview, it sounds like their main focus was to have a very high slew rate output on the digital interfaces (at least the AES and spdif -- who knows that they do on the optical).

"Our goal is to provide a perfect squarewave to the DAC, ... [one that] is able to turn around a corner at a perfect right angle and doesn't have wiggles and squiggles that confuse timing. ... We started to work on improving bandwidth rather than reducing noise [because] if we improved bandwidth, then life, verve, vigor and emotional involvement—the stuff that makes you smile, cry, or dance—came through. ... If we allowed noise at the beginning of the signal, we would have to start filtering and slowing things down to get rid of the problem."

I don't know what this means for motherboard layout, except maybe they wanted to get a little distance and power supply isolation for the digital audio output stage.

Really, this seems pretty pointless to me. AES/spdif equipment is designed for about 40% raise/fall time over one clock cycle. I believe some (many?) AES/EBU interfaces are transformer coupled, so having an enormous BW square wave is likely lost on those.

Maybe they are talking about the word clock output, or the embedding of a word clock in AES3 data? But it seems to me who cares about the rise time as long as it has high accuracy in the cross-over voltage period. A high slew rate is worthless if there's jitter. And the word clock is not the data clock -- downstream devices will be sampling it and generating their own data clocks, so there's likely a limit to how much benefit you can get.

 

[ahofer]

What’s the point of a perfect square wave? If it made a difference, wouldn’t your ears be constantly bleeding from radio transmissions?

 

[sq225917]

Nothing can make a perfect square wave, all have some slew. One assumes a device capable of making a decent fist of a square wave might also manage better timing accuracy, might.

 

[Mojo Warrior]

Where's JA and his measurements?

The "ground breaking proprietary technology" in this device probably contains high amounts of rumble, wow, flutter, inner groove distortion, harmonic distortion, VTA error and disc warp, while completely eliminating jitter!

But hold on to your credit cards, kids. In the Spring they will be releasing an upgraded model Mk II with VU meters!

You'll be the envy of your audiophile friends (while they mock you behind your back).

 

[audio2design]

Wow ... Serious BS

 

[Robin L]

I play back most of my music either from a laptop into a Topping E30 or a Fiio M3K, a cheap [$70] and small [9.2 cm x 4/5 cm x 1.4 cm] device that only plays back files, all sorts. I bought an additional 512gb card [$80] that holds about 1600 CDs worth of music. There's no streaming on the DAP, [streaming glitches on my low-end laptop on account of a lack of resources, like RAM]. I tell myself that the E30, measurably exceeding the limits of my hearing, has to sound better than the DAP, but if there's a difference [I tell myself the DAP has a "Softer" sound, but that's probably because I use the DAP mostly for background music], I'm not hearing it. I'm pretty sure that the DAC in the M3K would measure worse than the Topping DAC, but it really doesn't make a meaningful difference in practical or audible terms. The additional application of money via this streamer would probably sound the same to me no matter the overall quality of the system otherwise. There's measurable limits to what we can hear and a well designed DAC easily exceeds those limits, no matter the cost.

 

[enricoclaudio]

 

[fatoldgit]

Philosophically and technically to me, these big arsed/expensive servers that contain digital outputs make no sense.

Yes, have a server that contains storage and optionally does upsampling but send the digital stream via TCP/IP to some lightweight/low noise end point that contains the digital output(s) and into an external DAC.

Thus the server doesnt need heroic levels of BS noise reduction (electrical/mechanical) cause it aint in your room.

It also means you can change out the much lower cost endpoint to something better/different if you get the itch without draining the wallet.

For me its LMS with my own web based GUI front end (cause I have some programming chops) into squeezelite on an intel SOC end point (not a NUC).

If you dont have the PC chops, get a shop to build the server and endpoint and save > $12,000.

Peter

 

[MaxBuck]

Functionally this appears to do everything my Bluesound Node does, at only 30 times the price.

 

[JSmith]

It has to do with the sheep...

JSmith