Antipodes Audio K50 music server

On the face of it, playing and streaming digital music files is a straightforward process. You direct data from various sources—some local, some “in the cloud”—perhaps via a reclocker/signal conditioner to a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). “And the music comes out here.”

Not so simple. Bits, it seems, aren’t bits, or not only. A digital datastream is also an analog signal. Noise and other signal errors endemic to multi-function computers not designed primarily for music playback can affect how music sounds. And then there are the practical issues of setting up and connecting everything optimally, and then organizing music files correctly, which can be especially difficult when ripping files from multidisc sets.

These obstacles are why so many audiophiles have either switched to one-box music server solutions or even thrown up their hands and stuck with physical media.

Ever since I began using my Roon Nucleus+ music server, powered by an HDPlex 300 linear power supply rather than Roon’s supplied switching power supply wall wart, I’ve wondered about the quality of other server/streamers that cost considerably more. I’ve listened to a few, including the Wolf Audio Systems Alpha 3 SX and the Innuos Statement.

From the Antipodes
In June, I requested a review sample of my most expensive yet, the one-box, flagship server made by New Zealand company Antipodes Audio, the K50 ($15,000, footnote 1). My contacts at the company were Mark Jenkins, Antipodes’s CEO, and Mark Cole, the company’s head of service, sales and marketing. Which meant that, in addition to figuring out how to operate a unique device with multiple choices of inputs, outputs, servers, and players, I had to figure out which Mark was which.

Jenkins, who was raised on Bizet, Puccini, Gershwin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and the Rolling Stones, spent several decades in the digital transmission, broadcasting, and telecommunications fields before he entered the hi-fi industry in 2004. He focused on cables at first and then turned to music servers.

“I was struck with a conundrum back in the ’90s,” Jenkins explained in an email; we also communicated extensively in WhatsApp. “Using computer audio opened up my library of music to me in a way that playing a record or a CD did not. Yet the record and CD sounded better. … This was despite me using a couple of different reclockers and some high-end DACs that claimed to fix jitter completely [and] render the limitations of the source irrelevant. … So I decided that the simple explanation that ‘data is just data’ needed to be examined.”

Experimentation led Jenkins to the belief that every component in a stereo system matters. “For computer audio, the idea that you can do a bad job at the source and fix it later is simply out of line with what I hear. … Many of our competitors focus on either a low-cost or a high-power computer to crunch numbers; then they rely on things like slow linear power supplies and add-on devices designed to filter noise or regenerate the signal to fix things after the event. … [Antipodes] starts with audio design from the ground up.

“As explained on our technology page, we believe the industry has focused too heavily on noise and adopted noise reduction techniques that compromise bandwidth.” Instead, Antipodes aims to ensure a high-quality digital signal from the outset and to preserve bandwidth. “We believe this sets the sound of our music servers well apart from those of our competitors.

“The problems of early digital have been leading people in the wrong direction. In the beginning, we were largely trying to get rid of the harshness and nasty top-end noise that came about through (a) using hard drives and (b) interference with the audio signal. A lot of the way that people dealt with that noise was to slow everything down with slow linear power supplies, noise filters, and regeneration, which tends to act like a filter as well. The fundamental difference between our approach and what we see most of our competitors doing is that we approach everything from the ground up rather than applying Band-Aids after the event. I think we are also unique in our focus on bandwidth as well as noise rather than focusing exclusively on noise.

“Our goal is to provide a perfect squarewave to the DAC, … [one that] is able to turn around a corner at a perfect right angle and doesn’t have wiggles and squiggles that confuse timing. … We started to work on improving bandwidth rather than reducing noise [because] if we improved bandwidth, then life, verve, vigor and emotional involvement—the stuff that makes you smile, cry, or dance—came through. … If we allowed noise at the beginning of the signal, we would have to start filtering and slowing things down to get rid of the problem.” Instead of “starting with rubbish, we design from the ground up to minimize noise. Because of that, we can also maximize bandwidth.”

In one of numerous follow-up chats with the two Marks, Jenkins noted that worldwide chip shortages had forced a few changes to the K50’s design and that the beta software I’d be receiving wouldn’t be bug-free (footnote 2). Nor was an updated manual available. What was consistent with the previous iteration of K50s, however, was that it honors Jenkins’s “personal bias that timbre must be accurate” for music to have life.

“The ultimate goal of Antipodes Audio is to deliver the emotional fulfilment that can be hard to achieve in the course of an ordinary day,” he said. “Every now and then, I listen to a distributor’s $130,000 turntable setup and ask myself, ‘What are we missing?’ The great turntables have a kind of life and verve to them that the music servers of a few years ago just didn’t get. Getting that life and verve into an Antipodes music server has been my biggest goal over the last few years. … It’s easy to get a music server to throw loads of detail at you; getting it to make musical sense is the hard part.”

Antipodes optimizes the K50’s power supplies to increase speed and lower noise. The company works with two manufacturers of industrial motherboards to ensure optimal tuning for precision and noise performance. “Tuning is really only available to a motherboard manufacturer,” Jenkins said. “With their help, we can optimize audio performance. This gets us high-quality, great-sounding motherboards, albeit at a relatively high cost compared to using standard motherboards.

“Your reference Roon Nucleus+ is not quite the same thing as the K50. The Nucleus is there to play the Roon server app; the K50 plays a range of server apps on one internal device and the selected player app on a second, isolated internal device. It also generates a full range of digital outputs using oven-controlled clocks.

“The K50 has three computational parts, each fed by a dedicated, overspecified, superfast low-noise power supply:

• The server computer runs the server apps, manages storage, manages internet streams. … In simple terms, it provides high-quality streaming of files over Ethernet to the player computer.

• The player computer runs the player apps, outputting via USB, and feeds the [other] digital outputs. In simple terms, it receives the files streamed from the server computer and turns them into digital audio signals.

• The digital outputs unit is run by an FPGA computing engine and does a few things including providing galvanic isolation from the other computers, reclocking the digital signals by means of an ultrahigh-quality, oven-controlled clock, and generating signals in appropriate formats for each digital output. It is worth noting that the conventional digital outputs (S/PDIF, AES3, I²S) need to be generated using a high-quality clock. This is less important for USB and much less important for Ethernet, where issues like noise and bandwidth assume greater importance.”

The K50 can work with Roon as server and player, Roon as server with Squeezelite or HQ Player as player, or Squeeze as server and Squeezelite as player (footnote 3). Jenkins refused to advocate one or the other in print, although he did acknowledge preferences. After strongly encouraging me to try everything I could, he said, “If you’re used to Roon, that’s a good place to start. But [every server/player] combination sounds different, and preferences can change as the different software changes.

Footnote 1: JA reviewed the company’s previous flagship, the DX Reference, in October 2015.

Footnote 2: This was an understatement.

Footnote 3: Squeeze and Squeezelite are the native apps for the Logitech Media Server, aka Squeezebox.

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Antipodes Audio Limited

Suite 1, 2 Ake Ake Place

Otaki 5512

New Zealand

(303) 495-2260 x116

antipodes.audio

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