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Audio News for February 10, 2017

by Audiophile Audition | Feb 10, 2017 | Audio News

New Astell&Kern AK70 Supports aptX HD Hi-Res Streaming – The hi-res digital audio player is an improvement over the AKJr. iPod nano-like digital music player which had a sluggish user interface and Spartan feature set. Now they have an almost perfect price-performance champ that is not their flagship player, but seems to right from every angle, and is $600. The 3.3-inch touchscreen user interface is slick and fluid. There’s a large numerical prompt of the volume, so you are never confused by it. The track you are playing is displayed with all the information on it. It weighs only 132 grams and is natural to hold in your hand. But if you also purchase their own leather-style case, you will have a hard time swiping the top of the screen accurately or cleanly. It is also obviously designed for right-handed users. Cinegy Introduces Cinescore Video Encoding Benchmark – Up to now there has not been a relevant way to measure video encoding performance for commonly used broadcast and professional video formats for SD, HD or UHD. Now Cinescore has free software on their website at cinegy.com. The commercial-off-the-shelf technology uses CPU-accelerated and graphic-card-equipped commodity machines, powered by Intel processors. A […]

Audio News for April 29. 2016

by Audiophile Audition | Apr 29, 2016 | Audio News

Audiophile-grade Streaming From Auralic Aries Mini – For about $550 the Chinese-made AURALiC Aries Mini comes in black plastic or white, hooks up to an existing DAC or amp and pulls music from the cloud or home-based data storage. There’s an optional low-noise linear PSU for $299 additional. The Aires Mini is also free to work with Bluetooth or Airplay. It is a Wi-Fi-cable NAS drive and plays lossless hi-res streaming from Qobuz and Tidal. Tidal Hifi is even an added free bonus for U.S. buyers for a year. John H. Darko in REVIEWSSOURCES thinks it’s analog outputs even sound better than the much more expensive Sonos system. See his review if you have an iPhone or iPad and are into hi-res streaming. Onkyo Has New DP-X1 Hi-Res Audio Player – It follows the Android system, sports separate DACs and amps for each channel, handles up to DSD and the new MQA formats and is only $899. It has 32GB built-in storage and can support up to 432GB. You have access to the Google Play Story and can plug into most any hi-res streaming system out there, including Tidal and Onkyo’s own OnkyoMusic. The main difference from a typical smartphone […]