Antipodes DX Music Server 1TB SSD w/ USB-32/384 DSD128 or SPDIF/AES3 outputs

Transcription

1 Antipodes DX Music Server 1TB SSD w/ USB-32/384 DSD128 or SPDIF/AES3 outputs AT 05 MS DX NZ$6, ea (incl. GST) STEREOPHILE Review Conclusion: "My frugal persona wants to say that, at one-eighth the price, my plain-jane Mac mini was fully competitive in sound quality with the Antipodes DX Reference. But it wasn t. My audiophile persona felt that, with the DX, there was a greater sense of ease, of you-know-what ability to the imaging, of involvement with the overall sound. And that s what it s all about, even without taking into consideration the DX s ease of setup and use. Highly recommended. I said highly".. John Atkinson - ANTIPODES DX AWARDED CLASS A+ COMPONENT CATEGORY by STEREOPHILE MAGAZINE - The DX is our flagship music server, adding wider dynamics, reduced noise floor and enhanced resolution - over and above the DS - and captures all of the swing and flow of the musical event. The DX achieves incredibly low electronic noise levels, which lets the music speak for itself, resulting in a magical musical experience with all types of music. The DX belongs in top-drawer audio systems where its superior music-making is obvious ANTIPODES DX 1TB, 2TB or 4TB SSD-Solid State Internal Storage for the Ultimate in Audio Performance Premium-Version of Our Proprietary Internal Linear Regulated Power Supplies As with all Antipodes music servers, the chipset speeds are tuned to minimise and spread electronic noise, reflecting the specific parts in each server. The DX is able to achieve a significant reduction in electronic noise interference compared to the DV and DS, delivering improvements in the perceived noise floor, refinement, organic solidity and musical coherence. The DX uses our breakthrough new core technology, an optimal layout, superior signal buffering and reclocking, a premium implementation of our dual linear power supply technology and solid state storage - for the ultimate in sound quality. DX interview with John Darko see; THE ANTIPODES MUSIC SERVER MODELS DS: Is our entry into high quality music and manages to completely eliminate digital glare and grain and the bass is able to match the speed, punch and grace of the music. It is avaiable with 1TB HDD or SSD, upgradeable to 4TB. DX: Comes atandard with 1TByte SSD - Sold State Hard Drive (upgradeable to 6TB) and delivers a whole new trick, bringing you so much closer to the music, so much more of the music, and the detail resolution is so effortlessly sweet, clear, immediate and dynamic that you are left convinced that there are no veils left to lift. ALL MODELS OFFER: - Easy access to your library, plays your high resolution files via USB, download direct to it and play, stream to UPnP A/V compliant players on your network. Page 1/6

2 - Outstanding digital audio performance. The glare and grain of digital audio is gone, and the music is underpinned by organic, rhythmic and tuneful bass. - Utterly stable, plug & play setup, with online remote assistance if you get stuck, from a firm that has been in the high-end audio business since As we developed our music server designs, each step generated less noise interference and allowed us to reduce and eventually eliminate the need for noise filtering. At each step the key change was a reduction in glare and grain from the mid-range up, and an improved organic bass with the speed and pitch accuracy needed to provide the music with its proper foundation. Hi Terry, "I have had a good change to listen to the, Antipodes Server and AURALiC DAC, and after listening to music for over 40 years I can honestly say I have never been happier with the sound. Before I would have to change cables and set up to suit the type of music I was playing going from classical to hard rock or compromising and setting up for something in-between. Well that is all over with the Auralic and Antipodes handling anything you can throw at it, and it does it with ease. To sum up it is so good at bringing all the detail out and in such a soft and rich way, it is like drinking the best red wine you have ever had. Thank you for taking me down this road, I have waited a long time to get there".....martyn :) REFERENCE LEVEL DIGITAL AUDIO PERFORMANCE Digital playback systems must have precise timing for the resultant analog signal to be accurate. But the precision of the clock used in a digital playback system is undermined if the digital signal suffers noise interference. Whereas in analog playback, noise is heard as noise, in digital playback noise distorts the very sound of the instruments and voices, and in a way that is very unnatural to the ear/brain. Typically it adds glare and grain, and robs the music of its solid bass foundation to the music. Antipodes Music Server designs are focused on optimising timing accuracy, and a big part of that is minimising electronic noise interference with the clock data. Unlike higher powered servers, Antipodes Music Server technology reduces electronic noise interference to such a low level that noise filtering (which adds its own set of problems, in particular robbing the music of energy) is no longer needed. - Fanless, silent operation - 2.5" slow-spinning HDDs using customised firmware - Custom scripts & firmware to optimise the handling of the digital signal - Two stages of digital signal buffering and re-clocking in the server - High-end USB audio output card with selectable 5v power - Custom-designed internal linear regulated power supply, with one rail dedicated to the USB audio card (superior to our ears to any battery solution) and, most crucially, fed from a uniquely designed power transformer.wifi Antipodes Servers do not include a wifi connection as wifi would generate large amounts of electrical noise inside the server and compromise audio performance. However you can connect via Ethernet cable to a wireless Access Point if desired without sonic penalty. USER INTERFACE Headless (no screen, mouse or keyboard needs to be attached) VortexBox Linux OS for easy remote maintenance from PC/Mac/iPad browser. Custom scripts simplify setup to plug and play. Simple click or tap to play with ipad/iphone/android/pc/mac remote applications. Easy remote management of music files using you choice of tools on a PC or Mac connected to the same network - music files on the music server are as easy to manage from your computer as if they were on the computer MEDIA LIBRARY MANAGMENT Automatically rips the main feature and language of movie disks, and stores the movie as a single playable file (MKV format) - to activate this feature you need to purchase a license (50 Euros via the VortexBox GUI) to use the pre-loaded software. Automatically manages your music library: - Rips & tags CDs, just insert the disk and it ejects when ripped - Automatically gets coverart from internet databases while ripping Page 2/6

3 - Automatically organises ripped music into folders by artist & album - And use any music management tool on a PC or Mac to adjust tags (eg. itunes, JRiver, dbpoweramp, MediaMonkey, Picard, etc). - Easily copy music files to & from the music server, or download directly - One-click to get coverart for music files that you copy/download Simple backup and restore to a USB hard drive (not included), or use your favourite backup program from a PC or Mac Rips in paranoid mode for the best possible rip, to uncompressed flac, indistinguishable from wav files in listening tests, superior to compressed flac. NAS access - store your music files internally and/or on your NAS to expand storage for a very large library. MUSIC PLAYBACK Control playback through a USB DAC with MPD client applications, or with SqueezeBox client applications Stream via Ethernet to Streamers or SqueezeBox products Plays all music file types (unless DRM protected) to your USB DAC: - Bit-perfect and gapless within the capabilities of your USB DAC - PCM files up to 32bit/384kHz - DSD64 & DSD128 (Double DSD) music files using DoP. CAN IT BE USED WITH LINN AND NAIM STREAMERS? Antipodes music servers include NAS functionality and have a DLNA server installed for streaming to UPnP devices fr instance Linn and the Naim Uniti is a streamer DAC and a number of customers use one of our Music Servers in preference to using a standard NAS for the simple reason - The sound Improves, and because it is silent you can locate it with your stereo equipment and keep the Ethernet path short. Plus you have the benefit of auto-ripping integrated into the NAS. A router is necessary so you would locate an Ethernet switch at your stereo rack and connect to the Uniti and the DS Ref with short Cat6 cables. STREAMING VIDEO Video rendering is not performed on Antipodes Servers. We recommend streaming video from Antipodes Servers to video rendering devices, as this makes it simple and easy to avoid the audio and video getting out of 'sync'. Antipodes Servers come with Plex Media Server and a DLNA server to stream to UPnP compliant video rendering devices, such as a Smart-TV, networked Blu Ray player, Roku, Boxee Box, WD Live etc. In this mode the Antipodes Server acts as a high quality NAS, with no setup hassles, auto-ripping, fanless/silent operation, superior sound and video quality, and rock-solid stability. WHY BIT-PERFECT IS NOT ENOUGH AND TIME DOMAIN ACCURACY IS SO IMPORTANT IN DIGITAL When you store a digital file you are storing 1s and 0s. But when you are transporting a digital file it is done using an analog carrier. The data is 1s and 0s but the method is either an electrical or optical waveform, and any such waveform is subject to potential noise interference. In any high-precision digital application, whether audio or guided missiles, being bit-perfect is not enough. Being time-perfect is also important. Any clock irregularities or noise interference with the signal affects the precision with which the downstream stages can process the stream, and therefore the precision of the end result. Time-domain distortion in digital is often referred to as jitter. The downstream stages can usually extract the correct 1s and 0s but in a real-time system, such as in playing digital files, noise distortion can obscure the timing of the recognition of a change in the analog waveform that indicates the 1s and 0s, and the resultant analog output is distorted. Even very minor levels of jitter can affect the ability of the ear/brain process to make sense of what it hears, instruments and voices don't sound natural, and musical enjoyment is diminished. Some digital engineers will disagree with the previous paragraphs, because in their abstracted view of reality digital is resilient to noise interference and able to reject moderate jitter. Other digital engineers will endorse what we are saying because in many fields, reducing noise interference with the waveform carrying the digital data is a major design challenge and critical to the precision of the end result. The argument, if there is one, is really about whether you can hear it. These issues don t matter if you are simply going to record these 1s and 0s on a hard disk at the destination. When stored, digital files have no jitter in them. Based on this, digital is argued to be fixable by buffering and reclocking the signal, late in the journey, close to the DAC. That is, first write the 1s and 0s to a buffer (which does not store jitter information) and then Page 3/6

4 clock it out with a good clock for a short journey to the DAC chip. This and similar stories have often been told to assert that a DAC is immune to jitter, or totally eliminates it. But it is simply not true. One key reason why it is not true is that a buffering and reclocking step is by definition a digital process with two sets of clock data in it (even if a common clock was used), and that in itself generates noise interference. Because the writing to the buffer and reading from it occur at the same time, it re-generates at least some of the problem that it purports to solve. Buffering and reclocking is a good idea, and we buffer and re-clock twice in our Music Servers. But it only reduces the noise in a digital stream. It does not eliminate it. Listening tests in a good system make it clear that reducing noise in the digital stream improves the analog output. We pose the analogy that the buffering and reclocking steps used to clean up digital are similar to the concept of suspension on a car. And the distortions in the waveform carrying the digital data are similar to roughness in the road s surface. Some suspension systems are more effective than others, but with any suspension system, rougher roads feel rougher, despite the benefits of the suspension system. We contend that it is important to not molest the signal at any point on its playback journey. This is a key way that Music Servers differ from Streamers. Streamers, using the car analogy, put all the emphasis on the suspension system and none on the smoothness of the road. Transfer over Ethernet using TCP/IP has no timing integrity approaching what is needed for high-end audio, so the money goes into the buffering in the Streamer. Whether this is better than the Music Server method or not is a matter for the ears, and heavily influenced by implementation skill. Another misleading claim is that the modern DAC chips themselves are resilient to jitter. It isn't easy to generalise about all DAC chips, but simplifying things, DAC chips these days tend to up-sample to a very high rate and then convert to analog at this high rate. This is done in order to use a gentle filter on the output. This is not to be confused with DACs that have separate upsampling stages before the DAC chip, which reduce the upsampling work that has to be done by the DAC chip. DAC chips will perform with greater precision when they have to do less work, and pre-upsampling helps, but successive upsampling has its downsides - so it is a trade-off. The misleading claim that is often made is that this upsampling by the DAC, whether before the DAC chip or in the DAC chip, removes jitter. Technically, the claim is correct but it does not tell the whole truth. The upsampling step results in a low jitter output but the jitter on the input is mapped to broadband noise - effectively meaning some of the bits are changed, so you are trading away bit-perfect data for reduced jitter. Jitter in the input still impacts the sound but in a slightly different way. The immunity to jitter is a myth, and the only value of the upsampling is on the filter needed to get rid of extraneous digital noise in the analog output. In Antipodes Music Servers the process is about minimising the influences that create jitter at every stage of the journey, AND buffer and reclock at each stage: Get a bit perfect read from the CD by ripping in paranoid mode. Eliminate any jitter at the first step by storing it on a hard disk for playback later. Store the files with zero compression (see below for an explanation why). Read from the hard drive, and transport the data with timing integrity all the way to the DAC, with obsessive emphasis on eliminating noise interference with the waveform carrying the digital data. Buffer and reclock, using precise clocks fed with heavily regulated power supplies, at each stage of the journey. There are many misunderstandings on this topic, but we can be concise. Lossless compressed files, such as ALAC and FLAC do not sound as good as AIFF and WAV files. The simple reason is that a compressed lossless file breaks down the music into frames and potentially compresses adjacent frames at different rates. This means that compressed lossless files play at a rapidly changing bit-rate. This is a recipe for high levels of jitter and such files have to expanded into a buffer and clocked out of the buffer just to play. As explained above buffering and reclocking does not put 'humpty dumpty' back together again, and so there is more jitter in a stream played from a ALAC or FLAC file than from a AIFF or WAV file. But beware of using WAV files. Apart from there not being a tagging standard for WAV files, the biggest problem is that there is no crc check (almost all file formats on your computer have a method to recover data automatically when it is lost due to small bit-level errors on your hard disks). This means your WAV files will acquire ticks and pops and eventually become unplayable. Therefore we rip to our version of FLAC, which is 100% compatible with the FLAC format, but which has no compression whatsoever. In blind testing the difference between uncompressed FLAC files and compressed FLAC files was reliably recognised, and no difference was recognised between WAV files and uncompressed FLAC files. You can convert your compressed FLAC files to uncompressed FLAC files using dbpoweramp on a PC or XLD on a Mac. Because FLAC is lossless, there is no damage done by having your files in a compressed form and then uncompressing them. They will sound the same Page 4/6

5 as if you ripped to uncompressed FLAC initially. Features Supplied standard 1TB SSD - Solid State Hard Drive (aprox 2,000 CDs), Upgrade to 2TB SSD - Solid State Hard Drive - additional $1,100 Upgrade to 4TB SSD - Solid State Hard Drive - additional $2,200 Upgrade to 6TB SSD - Solid State Hard Drive - additional $4,400 The Antipodes Music Server is optimised for high-end audio using state of the art software, design and audio grade computer parts. Options include: - Fanless, silent operation - Digital signal re-clocking and extensive noise filtering - USB audio output card with on/off toggle for USB 5v power supply - S/PDIF output - Analog RCA Output - Low-noise Ethernet streaming to Ethernet DACs - Custom scripts & firmware optimise audio performance - Reference level internal linear regulated power supplies,one for the USB audio card (out-performs batteries), and a second running everything else (no smps). - Internal music storage SDD options of 1TB standard or upgradeable to 4TB. - External music storage via USB, esata or connected to a NAS and USB Stick. - Streams any media file via Ethernet to SMB and UPnP clients (eg. Streamers, Smart-TV, etc) - Plays all music file types (unless DRM protected) to your USB DAC: - Bit-perfect and gapless within the capabilities of your USB DAC - PCM files up to 32bit/384kHz - DSD64 & DSD128 (Double DSD) music files using DoP. - Automatic high quality ripping and tagging slide the CD in and it will slide back out when it is finished. - Never any need to connect a keyboard, mouse or screen to the music server, or to ever interface with its software. - Music is controlled via any computing device connected to your network, such as your PC, Mac, ipad, ipod, iphone, Android tablet or smartphone. - Open source solid software platform with a huge user base; your music can be readily copied to or from the server, and backed up providing an unencrypted mirror of your music library. - Output via USB using SOtM PCI to USB interface.remote Control Control playback using any SqueezeBox compatible remote application on a computer, tablet or smartphone. We recommend ipeng for ipad and ipod, and Orange Squeeze for Android devices. Just download the application and open it. The application will automatically discover your Antipodes server and will then take a few minutes to cache the library meta-data, and you can start playing music. Auto-Ripping Just insert a CD. The Antipodes server will automatically rip all tracks, and get tags and artwork from the internet (relies on the album being recognised by the internet services used). Ripping takes a little longer than normal because Antipodes servers do not use error correction, so that you get a perfect rip. The ripped files are stored in uncompressed, lossless flac format using an Antipodes algorithm, for the best possible playback quality. We recommend you convert any existing files to uncompressed flac format or to aiff format (also uncompressed, with resilience and supporting tags). File Formats Antipodes servers can play almost any format, including wav, aiff, flac, alac, mp3, aac, ogg, etc; PCM to 32/384 & DSD64, DSD128 using DoP; and playback will be bit-perfect, provided your DAC is capable of decoding the music file. If your DAC does not have the capability to decode the file then the Antipodes server will in most cases transcode or down sample the file on the fly to a format the DAC can play. Versatility Antipodes servers can act as a conventional music server, outputing files through its high quality USB audio outputs to your USB DAC. But it can also act as a DLNA server, client or renderer. It can also play from a NAS and can play from internet music streaming sources such as Spotify and others. Page 5/6

6 Powered by TCPDF ( Plug-Ins Antipodes servers run SqueezeBox server to manage the music database and can use any relevant SqueezeBox plugin, of which there are many to choose from. Installing plugins takes just a few clicks. Management You never need to connect a keyboard, mouse or monitor to an Antipodes server. You can mange Antipodes servers, edit/copy/delete music files on the server, edit tags and cover art, and backup/restore your music from any PC or Mac connected to the same network as the server. Support Antipodes Audio provides support to assist users with setup and troubleshooting if needed. support@antipodesaudio.com for assistance. If necessary Antipodes support can log into your network remotely to show you what to do, fix setup errors or diagnose faults. Specifications Auto CD Ripper 1TB SSD storage standard, upgradeable to 4TB SSD. All alloy chassis and fanless Available in Silver or Black Auto CD Ripper to Uncompressed Flac Paranoid-mode for bit-perfect rips USB Audio 2.0 Output Auxiliary S/PDIF Output Analog RCA Outputs Internal Linear Regulated Power Supplies VAC or VAC Power consumption 44VA; 15VA standby 85H x 430W x 273D mm Shipping weight 7kgs Review Lets be clear...i am talking about a richer and more rewarding musical experience. - Michael Lavorgna REVIEW SUMMARY: I was very much impressed by the Antipodes DX from the get go. Over time, I became more and more enamored with its ability to serve up an infectiously musical signal clearly outperforming the MacBook Pro as music server. If you are looking to get the most out of your file-based playback including streaming from services like Tidal, I'd recommend putting the Antipodes DX on your A-list of servers to audition. Link Page 6/6