The Well-Tempered Computer, an introduction to computer audio

Monday, September 30, 2013

Resonessence Labs Herus

In case of small portable USB DACs there is the flavor of the month DAC
There is the Audioquest DragonFly doing 24/96.
This was pretty soon surpassed by the Meridian Explorer doing 24/192
Now there is the Herus supporting PCM up to 24/352.8, DXD and DS64/128



Herus $ 350.00



Small PCM and DSD capable USB DAC
63.5mm (2.5in) long, by 31.7mm (1.25in) wide and 19mm (0.75in) high

Asynchronous USB Audio 2.0: PCM bit width 24 or 16
Supported Data Rates: 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192 and 352.8 Ks/S
Supported Formats: PCM, DXD and DSD64/128 Uses DoP protocol 1.1 over USB for DSD
Operating Systems MS Windows, MAC OS and Linux
Use the Resonessence Thesycon Driver for USB Audio 2.0 on Windows
Output Signal Level At Maximum Volume level: 2.4 VRMS
Output Impedance:   0.2 Ohms
SNR at least 100 dB, Typically 108dB
THD at least 85 dB, Typically 90dB

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Sony HAP-Z1ES HDD Audio Player



Playback of DSD and the full range of Hi-Res file formats, Analog FIR filters, 1TB hard drive for local music playback and storage, DSD re-mastering engine converts all signals to DSD signals, built-in Wi-Fi for app control and music transfer.

A player with 1 Tb of storage but according to the specs can accommodate only 20.000 titles!

Price: £1,999.00 Incl. Vat

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

RaspyFi


A Linux distribution with MPD for the audio optimized for (as you might have guessed) the Raspberry Pi.

Features:
-Ready to play, download it, flash it, wire it and you’re ready to go!
-Supports almost all DACs
-Bit perfect playback (up to 32bit 192 khrtz)
-Samba support, for reading music stored on NAS
-Fat32 and NTFS support, connect your USB storage and you’re ready to go
-Audio output also from analog Jack
-Only few process are active, less is more in audio reproduction
-Web-radio, Spotify and Last.fm supported
-Mp3, Wav, FLAC, AAC, ALAC support
-A nice webgui to configure and control RaspyFi
-You can control RaspyFi with lot of Apps for Mac,Win, Linux, Ios and Android
-Wi-Fi support out of the box
-Fits on 2gb SD
-Beets is included, to manage your library and get rid of bad metatags
-Optimized to reduce SD card wearing
-Wi-Fi ready out of the box

Website: RaspyFi