Upon thought, I wonder if the E5 is better than the Olive Symphony - which via a DAC got an almost "perfect" rating
http://stereophile.com/mediaservers/406olive/
Quote:
Being able to select from its library at a touch of the remote made musical browsing effortless. Going back to feeding CDs into the Mark Levinson transport seemed quaint by comparison. Sonically, using the server to feed digital data to my high-end system, the Symphony seemed beyond reproach. Of course, both my D/As have excellent jitter rejection, but no aspect of the sound gave a clue that I was listening to audio data being pulled in packets from a hard drive rather than being streamed continuously from an optical disc. Perhaps, in direct comparison with a CD being played on the Levinson, the uncompressed 16-bit file played on the Olive had slightly less image depth and LF definition, and was a bit more forward a presentation, but this wasn't anything I could reliably detect without being able to switch back and forth. |
, and factoring in a combination of DAC / analog playback quality (together) got a Stereophile Class "C" overall - considering that the Olive Symphony is about the same price as the E5
and offers 80GB HDD music server to boot.
The Olive's drives got a very nice 308 picosecond or so (depending upon analog / digital out) test result...
Hmmm. Is the Olive not getting enough love here? Is this indeed FOTM?
Just thinking for people here.
Or...
what about the Alesis MasterLink ML-9600? A Stereophile Class
A rating - currently on sale from numerous places for $799.99!! (one place is even "throwing" in 50 CD-R's) Woah!
Class A sound, a CD-R burner and a 40GB music server...all wrapped up in a single $800 package?!!! It's even available B-stock with a 20GB drive for $699! It's jitter performance is almost stunning at 176 picosecond on CD, very good at 275 picoseconds off the HDD, just with some low-frequency random jitter and a 'not perfect' digital noise floor.
A music server, CD player, CD copier / burner and Stereophile-backed Class A sound...starting at $699. And once purchased Balanced Power Technology offers Stereophile-recommended mods, too.
Is the E5 / Chinese goods the best way to go here?