Antipodes Audio DXe Music Server black call or email for details

  
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These music servers are awesome, call or email for details and pricing, some demos available. 
Antipodes DXe Music Server 

In Black or Silver
Auto CD Ripper
1TB, 2TB or 4TB HDD Storage
USB Audio Output
Internal Linear Regulated Power Supplies
Power consumption 44VA; 15VA standby
85mm (h) x 430mm (w) x 273mm (d)
Shipping weight 7kgs
Warranty 1 Year - All Manufacturing Defects

The DXe replaces and improves on the Blue Moon award winning DS Reference, as the biggest bang for the buck product in our music server range. The DXe is specifically tuned for use with our custom hard disk drives, offering audio performance approaching our flagship DX, but at a significantly lower price, and with options for up to 4TB of internal storage. The DXe uses only HDD storage and employs a simpler power supply design than is used in the DX.

MUSIC PLAYBACK

Playback functionality covers everything you will want to do, and satisfy your family's music needs too.

Auto-rip your CDs or download high-resolution PCM or DSD files, and play back almost any music file format (unless DRM protected):
- Bit-perfect and gapless within the capabilities of your USB DAC
- PCM files up to 32bit/384kHz
- DSD64 & DSD128 (Double DSD) music files using DoP.

Playback can be controlled wirelessly using any SqueezeBox client application - whether you are using an iPhone, iPad, Android tablet or smartphone or Windows tablet. Plug-ins enable a wide range of services and playback functionality, with one of our favourites being Smart Mix. We recommend iPeng 7 for iPhone/iPad, Orange Squeeze for Android and Squeeze Remote for Windows tablets, but several excellent alternatives are also available. These applications are easy and intuitive to use, beautiful to look at, fully featured and very robust. Just choose the one you prefer.

Or you can use Squeezebox Server from any PC or Mac.

You can also play internet streaming services such as Spotify, Qobuz, Pandora etc.

The best sound quality is obtained by playing out of a USB audio port to a USB DAC but you can also stream over your network to streamer DACs, Sonos, SqueezeBox products, etc.

MEDIA LIBRARY MANAGEMENT

Antipodes music servers automatically manage your music library:
- Rip & tag CDs, just insert the disk and it ejects when ripped
- Automatically gets coverart from internet databases while ripping
- Automatically organises ripped music into folders by artist & album
- Use the in-built Bliss tagger or use your preferred music management tool on a PC or Mac to adjust tags for files on the server.

Easily copy music files to & from the music server, or download directly

One-click to get coverart for music files that you copy/download

Simple backup and restore to a USB hard drive (not included), or use your favourite backup program from a PC or Mac

NAS access - store your music files internally and/or on your NAS to expand storage for a very large library.

THE FOCUS IS ON HIGH-END AUDIO PERFORMANCE

The early years of computer-based audio showed how easier access to our music collections could be more important even than audio fidelity for many audiophiles - and sure enough good CD players sounded better. Antipodes Audio launched its music servers with one purpose - to deliver music servers with superior two-channel audio performance to CD players. The emphasis is unashamedly on sound quality, not bells and whistles. For this reason our music servers are designed from the ground up to optimise sound quality. If we can add some nice-to-have features without compromising sound then we will.

Digital playback systems must have precise timing for the resultant analog signal to be accurate. Whereas in analog playback, noise is heard as noise, in digital playback noise distorts the very sound of the instruments and voices, and usually in a way that is very unnatural to the ear/brain. Typically it adds glare and grain, and robs the music of its solid bass foundation. Antipodes Music Servers employ high precision clocks to output the digital signal. But the challenge with using a computer architecture to play audio is that computers typically generate high levels of electronic noise interference. Noise interference with the digital audio signal affects timing because it creates uncertainty of the signal timing for the digital receiver.

For these reasons, addressing noise interference is the most critical issue in music server design, and drives our technology development and choices. Antipodes Audio's solution is focused on minimising the generation of noise, and then ensuring the residual noise and its dissipation are benign. Generating high levels of noise and then attempting to filter the noise out yields a far inferior result. Our research has shown that component selection and then controlling how that component works - through customising BIOS, firmware and software - is the key to managing and minimising electronic noise. The outcome is counter-intuitive for someone that thinks that building a music server is like building a computer. Often the slower chip-sets, or the slower interfaces sound better than the latest computer chip-sets. Yet more can be gained by tuning the speeds that chips operate at to place noise in benign frequency bands. The first and most important step is to get the core design of the music server right in respect to the electronic noise it generates and the clean buffering and clocking of the output.

The second step is all about power supplies, but is only worth doing if the core music server design is good. All digital audio needs tightly regulated voltage feeds, but the problem is that all voltage regulation involves switching. The answer is not as simple as using a power supply with low ripple, but about minimising switching noise and ensuring the switching noise is in a benign frequency range. There are several linear power supply designs, but some sound considerably better than others, and best of all is selecting one that enables the switching noise to be tuned to be benign. But even more important than the voltage regulation is the transformer used. Different transformer designs and different ways of screening them have profound impacts on the sound quality of a music server.

Third on this list is the choice of hard drive. Different hard drives generate different electronic noise. In our DS and DS Reference we use slow spinning 2.5" hard drives using customised firmware, so that we can not only keep noise down but also tune it. In our DX we use the superior but more costly solution of only using solid state storage.

Fourth on the list is ripping quality. Antipodes music servers rip in paranoid mode, using no error correction. Typical ripper software uses error correction and discourages the use of paranoid mode because it is very hard on ripper hardware, and you need to intervene to eject some disks that are too difficult to rip. But we think it is important so use high quality ripper hardware and ripping is in paranoid mode. Rips will take longer, some disks may be too hard to rip perfectly and you may need to rip them on your computer and copy the files to the server instead. Once you hear the difference, you will understand why we do it this way.

Fifth on the list is file format. There is confusion amongst audiophiles on this point. The key issue is not so much the format you use but that the format is lossless AND uncompressed. The need for lossless is generally understood, but the need for an uncompressed format is less well understood. Audiophiles have noticed that a WAV file sounds better than a FLAC file and so have assumed FLAC should not be used. But the difference they hear is due to standard FLAC compressing the file. Lossless compressed formats like FLAC and ALAC break down the music file into frames and potentially compress adjacent frames at different rates. This means you are playing back a file that has a bit-rate that keeps changing - a recipe for massive jitter. You can uncompress, buffer and reclock the file to equalise the bit-rate but no buffer and reclocking stage in a playback chain can ever put 'humpty dumpty back together again' perfectly, and so timing errors remain. When WAV and uncompressed FLAC files are compared they sound identical. Antipodes music servers rip to lossless and uncompressed FLAC, and we recommend you convert your existing files to uncompressed FLAC or to AIFF. Uncompressing the files and storing them on a hard drive for later playback does 'put Humpty Dumpty together again' perfectly.

The end-to-end strategy in Antipodes music servers can be summarised as:
• Get a bit perfect read from the CD by ripping in paranoid mode to uncompressed FLAC.
• Eliminate any jitter at the first step by storing it on a hard disk for playback later.
• Store the files with zero compression - we recommend you convert your existing files to uncompressed flac or AIFF.
• Read from the hard drive, and transport the data with timing integrity all the way to the DAC, with obsessive emphasis on eliminating noise interference
  with the waveform carrying the digital data - remember, all transmission of digital data is done using an analog waveform of some kind.
• Buffer and reclock, using precise clocks fed with heavily regulated power supplies, at each stage of the journey.