Mancave Update ... [mid october 2014]

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Crimson at night!
We sent back the Crimson Audio gear ...
The guys at Austin Hifi were generous to let us borrow the Crimson Amps and Preamps with a set of their crazy Good cabling. We made the trek to send back the giant Pelican cases happy that we heard it and with a tear in our eye.  While we're gathering our thoughts for a review, we'll say that this is a truly magnificent, transparent, fast and realistic sounding set of gear and we were happy to have tried it out.  We sent it back with a sad farewell, but hope we'd be able to make it a permanent part of the mancave at some point.  Stay tuned for a review ...

We had a network filled weekend ...

Cat7 ... shields and shields ... kill that RFI dead!
We spent a good chunk of the weekend upgrading the wired side of our home network (going from a mixture of Cat5, 5e and 6, and 10/100 switches) to Gigabit and Cat7 where possible.  We noticed that even when not using streaming services, it seemed like the noise floor was lower leaving us wondering that we may have been underestimating RFI and noise detracting from our system.

Added some new video capability ...

We FINALLY set up the couple of AppleTV's we had kicking around.  While both are more or less the opposite of perfectionist ideals, they are fantastic for streaming shows when you decide you don't need to subscribe to cable anymore, and pour all of that money into a fiber optic connection + a few subscriptions for streaming.   So far it beats the pants off of our TV's native streaming capability and was a snap to setup (We love how Apple products make you feel like A/V and Networking experts even though deep down you know and everyone else knows you aren't!).

Upgraded our Macs and BROKE our Squeezebox ...

OliveOne ... can somone live with it?
We have to right now, so yes ... but
it's a great piece of kit!
An upgrade to OSX 10.10 on our music computer (Mac Mini), also seems to have broken the Logitech Squeezebox Server - which forced us to go from using our OliveOne as an alternative "experiment" to relying upon it entirely.  We switched from a DLNA server we had used for an initial listen to the Plinius Tiki (Twonky) to a new one (Serviio) as well, which was a whole lot easier and seems simpler.  Given it's the 3rd party server software for the Synology NAS which most audiophile love, this might be a killer choice - we will let you guys know what we find.  But at $25 after a 14 day trial, it might be perfect for us.

OliveOne suddenly finds itself as our main streamer ...

The OliveOne is a pretty good sounding player, and while we plan on doing a full review of it eventually, it has too many rough edges to do a good review of it just yet.  We really feel it will be the improved, spiritual successor to the Logitech Squeezebox (RIP) - but until they add some critical features (Playlist support or being able to choose the order of play being the most important), and have another round or two of general refinement and stability fixes, we can only say we're impressed by its sound quality and excited by its potential.

Streaming at full Rez - 16/44.1
We gave Sonos more money ...

We also upgraded our Sonos Bridge to a Sonos:BOOST and we'll see if it makes a big difference.  But also speaking of Sonos and streaming, we love the sound quality of the Deezer Beta service available on Sonos Labs - and it brings Sonos one step closer to being a genuine high end product.  It's $20/mo but you get full 16/44.1 streams with a very large library that's skewed towards pop and rock. 

If Sonos ever offered the ability to play 24/96+ files with decent quality (now it will skip over them, and not even play them downrezzed!), it would be game over for so many of the germinating competition big and small, because their integration and software is so freaking good.
The Gramovox - Unboxed, and Fantastic!

The Crowdfunding Bounty comes rolling in ...We got both the Gramovox and the OliveOne in the past month.  The Jury is out on them both as we're just getting used to them, but anyone that thinks a horn based Bluetooth speaker isn't cool ... well they haven't seen or heard this baby!  More about this later - simple to use, and a vintage sound, and immediacy that only a horn can give!  Next we have our eyes on the guys at Light Harmonic ...

And what is ahead for us?
We have piles and piles of reviews and music session to do ... we slowed down from the pace a year ago ... but we're still at it, trying to bring to you guys our "regular family with regular means," take on the insanity that is perfectionist audio ...


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