Wireless music streaming and Bluetooth speakers may be the bigger market for audio these days, but that hasn’t stopped audiophile fans from clamoring for something better, and I’m not just talking about louder amps and bigger speakers.
The high-resolution audio movement gained a lot of momentum in 2014 (thanks in large part to support from Sony and rocker Neil Young). In fact, last year the Consumer Electronics Association even developed guidelines for what qualifies as high-resolution audio (read more about that here).
TVs, smart home devices, fitness trackers and cars that drive themselves sucked up more of the spotlight at CES this year, but music enthusiasts looking for better-than-CD quality sound had several new products to check out, as well as a jam-packed presentation with Mr. Crazy Horse Young himself (who talked up the benefits of hi-res audio and his Pono player and music service.
What is hi-res audio? In a nutshell, it’s anything higher than CD. CD music is recorded at 16 bits/44.1kHz, while hi-resolution music files can be up as high as 24 bit/192KHz. Your typical free Pandora stream through a device like a Roku player or Sonos speaker gives you only 128 kbps. If you listen to that stream through your smart phone or tablet, it’s half that quality. Can you hear the difference? Well, that may depend on your ears, your equipment, your temperament and the present alignment of the planets.
Here are a few of the new high-resolution audio products shown at CES 2015:
Pono Player
The PonoPlayer is Neil Young’s baby, and started life as a very successful Kickstarter project. Pono supports playback of high-fidelity audio of up to 192kHz/24 bit resolution. The PonoPlayer includes two 1/8 inch (3.5 mm) audio output jacks which offer you four modes of operation: personal (with headphones); home stereo; PonoShare (for two simultaneous headphones); and balanced (left and right outputs are piped separately through both headphone jacks for high-impedance headphones or high-end home stereo systems.) $399
Sony Walkman NW-ZX2
Walkman is a venerated name for people of a certain age. I got my first cassette tape Walkman in the 80s. Now the Sony Walkman has moved into the digital age with portable NW-ZX2 which can play digital files up to 192 kHz/24 bit in a variety of formats including MP3, WMA, AAC, FLAC, AIFF, WAV and ALAC including DSD. It comes with 128GB of built-in memory and an expansion slot for a micro SD card slot. The built-in S-Master HX digital amplifier was developed for Hi-Res audio and reduces distortion and noise while reproducing wide frequency response. Just add your own high-quality headphones. At $1,119 it’s a little more than your average iPod.
Technics SU-R1 Network Audio Player
Panasonic is back in the audio market again with its original Technics brand, and the products have come a long way. The SU-R1 Network Audio Player receives audio signals from digital devices, such as NAS, PCs, USB memory devices and digital interfaces and passes the signal and volume control information directly to the power amplifier in digital form. The system features a Digital Noise Isolation Architecture, a high-precision clock generator and independent high-precision Burr-Brown PCM1792 (Texas Instruments) digital to analog converters for left and right channels. The circuits after the D/A converter are of a balanced configuration, using non-magnetic film resistors, low equivalent series resistance capacitors and a high-quality LME49720 (Texas Instruments) OP amp. Analog inputs are converted to digital with the high-precision Burr-Brown PCM4220 (Texas Instruments) 192-kHz/24-bit A/D converter, allowing high-purity sound with digital and analog sources alike.
Astell & Kern AK500N
Astell & Kern have recently built a strong reputation among audiophiles for their headphones and personal music players, but the AK500N it the company’s first home music server and network audio player for high resolution music. With a built-in 1 TB solid state drive, you can rip CDs straight to the system in one click. It includes PCM to DSD conversion, jitter and error correction. CDs can be saved as 32 bit/384 kHz WAV PCM or 24 bit/352 kHz FLAC PCM file and converted to DSD64 data without any down-sampling. Album art and metadata automatically gets downloaded from the Gracenote database.
For more audio news from CES, check out this article on the latest wireless speakers.
schalliol says
It’s great to see more action here. One that wasn’t included is Bluesound, which is like a 24/192 Sonos with better sound quality. I’ve been enjoying my system for a few months. They had some products at CES I understand as well.
grant clauser says
I agree, the Bluesound system is impressive. I reviewed it on Electronic House last year (read here). I didn’t include it in this roundup because it’s not a new product, and I was specifically highlighting systems that were new to the market. I’m sure I missed some others.