Streaming Holiday Gift Guide 2018
Music streaming has come a long way. Music lovers no longer have to choose between convenience and sound quality when accessing their favorite tunes from multiple sources. This year, give the gift of music!
Best Under $2,000
New from the Box Designs division of Pro-Ject, the Stream Box S2 Ultra is a Roon Ready Network Bridge that can be used with any USB DAC to upgrade and future-proof your system with modern streaming capabilities.
The Roon Nucleus runs Roon software to create a virtual librarian for your music collection. Simply plug Nucleus into your network, and you’ll be ready to play music using a wide variety of audio devices and a huge variety of USB DACs.
With Primare's I15 Prisma Integrated Amplifier, you get an entire connectivity suite through Prisma, which provides multi-room/multi-zone connectivity and control for playback of stored and streamed media, wired or wireless, all managed from any mobile device through a dedicated system control app.
Best Under $7,000
Transform your home audio system into a wireless audio system with the McIntosh MB50 Streaming Audio Player. The MB50 features DTS Play-Fi® technology to give you the freedom and flexibility to wirelessly play your music at home over your existing Wi-Fi network. Besides accessing your personal music library, the apps have built-in support for many leading online streaming services.
The dCS Network Bridge acts as an elegantly simple but hugely powerful interface between your digital music and your DAC. The hardware platform in Network Bridge enables you to stream high resolution music files from network attached storage, connected USB drives, online streaming services as well as Apple devices via Apple Airplay, outputting bit perfect audio direct to your DAC.
The Mytek Manhattan DAC II (with optional network card) is a Roon Ready DAC with MQA Hardware Decoder. Vinyl lovers can add an optional phono preamplifier card as well, making the Manhattan DAC II the stuff of dreams for both analog and digital music lovers.
