Melbourne Audio Club monthly meeting - Bluesound - Not Your Average Wireless Multizone Audio
8pm Wednesday 21st October, visitors welcome. Willis Room, City of Whitehorse Offices Maroondah Highway (Whitehorse Road), Nunawading Melway Map 48 Ref G9 Contact: 9437 1249
The designers at NAD and PSB have come up with a brilliant solution to the problem of high-res, whole-house audio that combines superb sound reproduction with twenty-first century connectivity. With six models in the Bluesound Gen 2 line up, the brands products are a significant step-up from Sonos and Bose, with all models capable of 24-bit/192 kHz music decoding and playback.
This month's meeting we will have Convoy, the distributors for Bluesound, demonstrating two of their products. The Power Node 2 ($1499) and Vault 2 ($1999) both units offer similar functionality. Streaming audio from computers and NAS drives, Internet Radio and cloud -streaming services such as Tidal. The Power Node 2 streamer/amplifier uses Direct Digital amplifier technology, developed by NAD, to deliver 60W per channel. Speakers can be connected directly to the unit to create a room 'zone', all controlled with your tablet or smartphone.
The star of the Bluesound line up is the Vault 2, a CD ripper with 2TB of storage built in, with the ability to rip CDs in bit-perfect lossless FLAC without the need for a computer. It can search music from NAS drives or USB connected hard drives, as well as play back music to an existing Hi-Fi system via its stereo outputs or a coaxial digital out. With the Bluesound app and a tablet, you have the capability to add to your high-res music collection by downloading directly from Highresaudio Online Stores onto the Vaults hard drive.
Convoy will put together a system comprising of B&W speakers, a pair of CM6 S2s and the matching 10 inch subwoofer. The Bluesound system will demonstrate how mature this form of audio has become - the wireless transmission of music was once viewed as a novelty - it is now possible to do music over Wi-Fi up to 24-bit/96kHz, better than CD. With the slogan 'Hi-Fi never went away, it just never went wireless' Bluesound will appeal to a new group of audiophiles, will that be you?
Nick Karayanis Proxy proxy Program Co-ordinator / Vice President
Ken Tripp Wise and Wonderful Webmaster Melbourne Audio Club, Inc.
http://www.melbourneaudioclub.org.au