Naim Audio
Naim Audio
PSB
Lumin
Lumin

During the 2018 Toronto Audiofest, I had an interesting conversation with an industry colleague about active speakers and streaming music. As previously observed on Simplifi, my living room can’t accommodate a conventional component system comprising amps and passive loudspeakers. Nor can it accommodate physical media such as CDs and LPs. For that reason, I’ve built my main hi-fi system around a pair of Elac Navis ARF-51 active speakers ($4599.96/pair, all prices USD), which have 300Wpc of built-in amplification. I stream all my music to the living room over our home network.

A trick question: What are the most valuable components of your music system? I don’t know about yours, but the most valuable parts of mine are space and time. If that sounds like new-age hokum, stay with me—that insight has a lot to do with how I’ve configured my hi-fi system, how I use it, and the writing I do in this corner of the SoundStage! Network.

Last spring, I added a new component to my audio wish list: a subwoofer. It happened after I’d conducted an experiment in which I compared my Elac Navis ARF-51 active floorstanding speakers ($4599.98/pair, all prices USD) with a pair of Elac Navis ARB-51 active stand-mounted speakers ($2299.98/pair), the latter augmented by an SVS PB-2000 Pro subwoofer ($899.99). I wanted to find out which would give me better sound: a pair of full-range floorstanders, or a pair of minimonitors plus a sub. The Navises employ the same drivers, crossovers, and amplifiers—in short, that minimum of variables made these two models an ideal test bed for my experiment.

At the start of 2020 — it seems an age ago — I’d made some ambitious travel plans for the year: In March, I’d take the train to Montreal for the Audiofest; in April, I’d fly to Chicago for AXPONA. In May, I’d jet off to Munich for the High End show. In October I’d stay in my home city to attend the Toronto Audiofest, and in November it would be off to Warsaw for the Audio Video Show.

It sounds like a nice problem for a speaker maker to have: Some hot new models are launched, and the first batch immediately sells out. That’s what happened when PSB announced powered versions of its acclaimed Alpha P3 and Alpha P5 minimonitors.

In the last decade, recorded music has undergone a sea change -- it has become disembodied. From the late 19th to the early 21st century, music was distributed on physical media. In the early 21st century, digital downloads held sway, then quickly gave way to on-demand streaming.

A year ago this week, Amazon shook up the audio world with its announcement of Amazon Music HD, a streaming service that today offers 60 million tracks in lossless 16-bit/44.1kHz CD resolution, plus “millions” of hi-rez tracks in resolutions up to 24/192. While lossless and hi-rez files were already available from Qobuz and Tidal, the leading streaming services all used lossy codecs, so Amazon’s embrace of hi-rez audio was big news.

On a Friday morning, two years ago this month, an unexpected e-mail from SoundStage! publisher Doug Schneider appeared in my inbox. I say “unexpected” because, at the time, I barely knew Doug. We’d met a few times at such audio events as CEDIA and the Consumer Electronics Show, and I knew Doug by reputation, having been a regular reader of SoundStage! publications since the Network’s launch, in 1995. We arranged to chat by phone.

In the two years I’ve been writing for SoundStage! Simplifi I’ve reviewed 15 stereo loudspeakers, all of them active or powered models. There’s a practical reason for this. I don’t have a dedicated music room, and our living room isn’t big enough to accommodate a conventional audio system of separate components: sources, amplifiers, and passive speakers. So the music systems in our current home have been built around active speakers -- first, Dynaudio’s Focus 200 XD, which, following a firmware update, is sonically and functionally identical to the newer Focus 20 XD ($5999/pair, all prices USD); and, later, Elac’s Navis ARF-51 ($4599.98/pair).

When I reviewed Elac’s Navis ARF-51 active floorstanding speakers ($4599.96/pair, all prices USD) in September 2019, I rediscovered something I’d been missing for the previous six years: kick-ass bass.

Many of the products I’ve recently reviewed for Simplifi have been DACs with built-in streamers -- most recently, Bryston’s BDA-3.14 ($4195, all prices USD) and iFi Audio’s Pro iDSD ($2749); and, before that, NAD’s Classic C 658 ($1649), Lumin’s T2 ($4500), and Naim Audio’s ND5 XS 2 ($3495).

  1. Big Events
  2. Rules of the Game
  3. The Name Game
  4. January 1, 2020: The State of Streaming
  5. Warsaw’s Audio Video Show 2019, Simplifi’d
  6. Toronto Audiofest 2019, Simplifi'd
  7. Hi-Rez à-Go-Go
  8. Streaming the Classics
  9. Play Nice Together -- An Interview with Rob Darling of Roon Labs
  10. Active Voices, Part Three: KEF's Jack Oclee-Brown
  11. High End 2019, Simplifi'd
  12. Active Voices, Part Two: Axiom Audio's Andrew Welker
  13. Montréal Audio Fest Simplifi'd
  14. Active Voices, Part One: Elac's Andrew Jones
  15. Let's Keep it Simple
  16. A Roon of One's Own
  17. How I Simplifi'd My Wi-Fi
  18. Are Downloads Dead?
  19. Hi-Rez Streaming: Tidal vs. Qobuz
  20. Toronto Audiofest 2018 Simplifi'd
  21. How I Simplifi'd My Hi-Fi
  22. Time to Celebrate: Five Years of Google Chromecast
  23. How Good Can Voice Recognition Get?
  24. Are Smart Speakers Any Good for Audiophiles?
  25. High End 2018, Simplifi'd
  26. Is the Smart Speaker a Dumb Idea?
  27. What's Up with Apple AirPlay 2?
  28. The Spotify Dilemma
  29. CES 2018, Simplifi’d
  30. Farewell, CES
  31. Room Tunes
  32. Social Streaming
  33. CEDIA 2017, Simplifi’d
  34. Classical Prime Time
  35. The Röst Reconsidered
  36. High End 2017, Simplifi'd
  37. Vinyl: There's an App for That
  38. Metadata: Life with Roon
  39. The Internet and Audio: The Good, the Bad, and the Impossible
  40. The State of Streaming
  41. CES 2017, Simplifi'd
  42. Why "Simplifi"