Antipodes DS-BASE Music Ripper/Server w/dac-rca USB SPDIF Roon Spotify(excl HDD)

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1 Antipodes DS-BASE Music Ripper/Server w/dac-rca USB SPDIF Roon Spotify(excl HDD) AT 03 MS DS NZ$3, ea (incl. GST) NEW 3rd GENERATION DS-BASE MUSIC SERVER - OFFERING REFERENCE LEVEL DIGITAL AUDIO PERFORMANCE The DS Base borrows its core technology from the DX, and its system software, application software, database and caching are all on solid state. The DS Base is now available with HDD (spinning hard drives) or SSD (solid state drives), for music storage, and operating system, database and cache is on solid state. The DS Base uses a semi-switched power supply, which has a switched rectification and step-down stage, followed by a linear DC regulation stage. The use of spinning hard drives makes storage much more affordable but is a step down in audio performance from using SSDs, as used in the DX. Note that we only use quiet 2.5" (laptop) spinning drives, and do not use the cheaper 3.5" drives used in many music servers. The 3.5" drives generate several times more vibration, heat, acoustic noise and electronic noise interference. Note that if using Roon with a large library, using spinning hard drives for the Roon software and database will mean slower responsiveness compared to using SSDs. This only applies to the very high I/O requirements of the Roon Server application. For this reason the DS is able to be purchased with a medium-sized SSD to hold all software and the Roon database, with files stored on spinning hard drives. How The DS Works The DS starts with getting the best possible rip from your CD collection. Playing a CD in near-real-time will not get a perfect read, but a ripping process can slow down to re-read the disc when necessary till a perfect rip is achieved. Antipodes servers have optimised the ripping hardware and software to get you the best possible rip with every CD. Music files are stored on the DS internal storage. The music files are able to be read perfectly from disk storage much faster than real time playback, and so the music files are first transferred rapidly in block mode into the DS RAM, and therefore the playback process begins in RAM - a source with the lowest possible latency. A key element of Antipodes server design is the purpose-built Linux operating system, running only the services necessary to play the music files. This is in contrast to other systems where RAM is busy with multiple tasks at once. In our experience even the smallest unnecessary additional activity in RAM will diminish the sound quality of a music server. Although reading from a storage drive is superior to reading from a spinning CD, the problem with using a standard computer or a mediocre music server, is that they generate electronic noise at a much greater level than any CD player, and this noise pollutes the digital signal to the DAC. But what makes all the difference is that Antipodes servers have been designed and tuned to both minimise noise interference with the digital signal, and to tune the frequency spectrum of the residual noise to place it in a benign part of the spectrum. "I've 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 Page 1/6

2 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 :) 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 - 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 Page 2/6

3 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 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. Page 3/6

4 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 as if you ripped to uncompressed FLAC initially. Features DS-Base supplied standard LESS hard drive UPGRADE to 1TB HDD additional - $150 UPGRADE to 2TB HDD additional - $300 UPGRADE to 4TB HDD additional - $450 UPGRADE to 1TB SSD additional - $1,200 UPGRADE to 2TB SSD additional - $2,400 Note - client can supply their own 2.5" SSD at time of ordering and we will install at NC, we recommend Samsung Evo 2.5" SSD. The New 3rd Generation DS uses the same core technology as the DX and so is similarly open, dynamic and musically Page 4/6

5 expressive. New Output technology has dramatically reduced the noise floor and eliminated digital glare and grain. The DS now comes standard with a new, innovative, hybrid switching/linear power supply that optimises the audio performance of the DS. REMOTE CONTROL Smartphone/tablet/PC/Mac remote control Download any SqueezeBox-compliant app Auto-discovery of music server and meta-data VERSATILITY Music Server/DLNA Server/Streamer Built-in DAC, RCA & USB output or via UPnP devices From internal or external storage, or music services AUTO-RIPPING Insert the CD and it ejects when ripped Paranoid mode to Uncompressed Compressed FLAC Tags/artwork automatically from the internet PLUG-INS Install with just a couple of clicks Access subscriptions - Spotify Connect, Qobuz... Smart-mix auto-generates perpetual playlists FILE FORMATS Plays wide range of file formats Spotify Connect Roon Ready (optimised) Wav, Aiff, Flac, Alac, Mp3, Aac, Ogg, etc PCM to 32/384 and DSD64, DSD128 using DoP MANAGEMENT Browse to the server's GUI to set it up Edit/copy/delete music using your PC/Mac Easy backup/restore with a couple of clicks Specifications Available in Satin Black or Silver All alloy chassis Fanless oppoeration Auto CD Ripper to Uncompressed FLAC Paranold-mode for Bit-Perfect rips ISB Audio 2.0 (to 2xDXD & Double DSD) output SPDIF RCA Output ANALOG RCA Output Internal DAC: PCM-32/384, DSD68 & DSD128 1TB, 2TB or 4TB HDD storage USB Audio Output (for alternative external DAC etc) Universal Voltage External SMPS PSU 12vDC 5A DS Server: 230W x 220D x 80H mm PSU: 55W x 125D x 55W mm Shipping weight 5kgs Warranty 1 Year - All Manufacturing Defects Review Page 5/6

6 Powered by TCPDF ( This kind of audible result mustn t be uncommon. Other DS/DX owners must surely be netting similar joy probably the number one reason why Jenkins is scaling his distribution network to include Murica. - John H Dakop REVIEW SUMMARY: the DX server easily aces a MacBook Air + Audirvana+ + Resonessence Labs Concero HD combo, even when feeding the digital inputs of Peachtree s Nova220SE, thus presenting a convincing case for buying an Antipodes Audio server before dropping cash on a more deluxe outboard D/A converter. You don t what you ve got till it s gone. Fortunately, that which is gone I never want back: the digital glare of the MacMini. I didn t know the Apple box wasn t so troubled by the stuff until I spent time reviewing Antipodes ( An tip uh deez ) Audio s DS music server for 6Moons during the first few weeks of Link Page 6/6