A new year, a new round of exciting products to welcome into the Roon Ready family. This month we’ve got classic designs relaunched for the modern music lover, revolutionary audio solutions that integrate seamlessly with your home’s interior design, and a range of DAPs from ‘entry level’ to ‘top of the line’. Let’s get started!
Naim NSC 222
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Naim Audio – a huge marker for one of Britain’s most iconic high-end audio brands. In celebration of a half-century of sonic excellence, Naim are relaunching their classic 200 series, harking back to some of their greatest hardware achievements whilst offering plenty of product enhancements for the 2023 music lover to really get their teeth into.
Right at the forefront of this relaunch is the Naim NSC 222 – a user-focused streaming pre-amplifier with dizzying functionality and uncompromising sound quality. Housed in a beautifully designed chassis, the NSC 222 utilizes Naim’s time-honored commitment to engineering excellence to get the very best from your music, comfortably handling bit-rates of up to 32bit/284kHz. The NSC 222 comes Roon Ready for easy and instant access to your Roon library, along with a host of other top-name streaming services and radio stations. True to their roots, Naim hasn’t forgotten about your analogue music collection, either. Amidst a full range of connectivity options there’s an MM phono input for integrating vinyl into your digital listening system.
Zuma Lumisonic
Here at Roon, we occasionally see a new product that looks like it’s a genuine game-changer. The Zuma Lumisonic feels truly revolutionary, offering music lovers a whole new and novel way to integrate high end audio into their home.
The Zuma Lumisonic is a ceiling light and a speaker, combining mood-sensory lighting and immersive sound to generate the ultimate ambience within your home. Zuma’s truly brilliant integrated sound and lighting solution potentially removes the need for cabling or big, bulky tech products within your home entirely.
The Zuma Lumisonic units may be small enough to fit into a standard recessed light fitting, but this doesn’t come at the cost of sound or build quality. An HD-audio Class D monolithic amplifier is controlled by a top of the line quad-core processor for high-end sound quality. Each channel is actively filtered by advanced DSP algorithms for a totally immersive audio experience. From Lumisonic’s custom-built app, you can control both sound and lighting harmoniously, and link the two for a fully sensory experience. All your favorite streaming services are supported via the app, including Roon Ready compatibility built-in for a seamless Roon experience.
PSB Speakers – Alpha IQ
If you’re a home HiFi enthusiast, cable clutter is probably one of your biggest everyday irritations. So when you find speakers that combine reduced cabling with great sound quality, it’s definitely a product worthy of your attention. The Alpha iQ Streaming Powered Speakers from PSB Speakers strike that balance perfectly – making it easy to enjoy PSB’s trademark ‘True to Nature’ sound from streaming services and legacy sources, with significantly less cable clutter.
The two powered speakers carry 180W of built-in amplification, backed up by superb build quality and real attention to sonic detail – resulting in a clean, consistent sound whether you’re sitting or standing. And to top it all off, the Alpha iQ’s now come Roon Ready for simple and straightforward connection to your entire Roon library.
Fiio M11S, M11 Plus, M17
Chinese portable audio specialists Fiio have become synonymous with on-the-go high performance listening in recent years, becoming a firm favorite for music lovers and audiophiles across the globe. We’re delighted to announce the introduction of four of their flagship portable music players to the Roon Ready family. Let’s take a look at each new addition in turn.
FiiO M11S
The FiiO M11S offers up Fiio’s trademark power and sound quality at a relatively budget-friendly price point, making it a great option for audiophiles exploring the world of DAPs for the first time. Under the sleek casing, the M11S is powered by a Snapdragon 660 processor, and great audio quality is guaranteed from two fully balanced Dual ES9038Q2M DAC chips. It all adds up to give the M11S a slick, immersive user and listening experience at an affordable price.
FiiO M11 Plus
The FiiO M11 Plus takes everything that’s great about the M11S and elevates it. An octacore Snapdragon 660 processor makes for lightning-fast useability from a 5.5inch touch screen display. Two balanced ES9068AS DAC chips take your portable listening to a whole new level, bringing a complete, rich sound to the music you love. It looks the part, too – it’s sleek black casing is further complemented by a unique, intelligent touch-panel volume system.
FiiO M17
The desktop-class FiiO M17 represents an entirely new chapter in digital audio players – quite possibly one of the most advanced DAPs available on the market today. It comes powered by two ESS ES9038PRO desktop-level dac chips, a seriously punchy THX 788+ headphone amp, and unrivaled gain and connectivity. It all adds up to give the M17 the output power and sound quality to rival and perhaps even surpass highly-rated desktop systems, but in a pint-sized, portable package.
SOULNOTE Z3
The SOULNOTE Z-3 is a Roon Ready bridge that provides network connectivity to audio devices using ZERO LINK, a new connection protocol developed in collaboration between Sforzato and SOULNOTE – two hugely popular brands among A-PAC audiophiles.
Utilizing their unique ZERO LINK technology, the SOULNOTE Z-3 maximizes audio quality by removing all asynchronous circuitry to create a significantly streamlined signal path. It can be used as either ZERO LINK or standard LAN to USB network transports. The Z-3 offers USB, SFP (RJ45 and optical input connectivity via SFP adapter) to USB or ZERO LINK output with support for up to 32-bit/768kHz PCM and DSD 512 formats. Besides as a Roon Ready device, the Z-3 functions also as a UPnP media renderer, an OpenHome renderer, and a Diretta Target (a proprietary audio protocol developed by Diretta). Control functions are facilitated via Linn’s Kazoo app for OpenHome.