![]() NAS storage is easy to expand so its capacity can be huge. Since NAS drives are installed on a network, files stored there can be played on any music playback device on the network-so you don’t need a separate copy on each music player device. With the N-05, only the folder view of the remote-control ESS app (see below) is available. Readily available at your local office supply store or Best Buy. The cheapest form of high-capacity storage single drives with 8 terabytes of storage capacity cost $250 or less. Which should you get? Here is a summary of pros and cons: Many file-based music players provide some sort of internal storage-a hard drive or a solid-state drive-but the N-05 does not you must provide an external drive, either a USB drive or a network attached storage (NAS) drive. As with all Esoteric products, the N-05 comes with a three-year parts and labor warranty. If $6500 seems expensive, keep in mind that Esoteric gear is made to the highest standard and $6500 is among the company’s lowest prices for audio gear. Not only capable of file-based playback, the N-05 also streams music from the Tidal online music service, for which a subscription is needed, and from the Qobuz music service, not available in the U.S. There aren’t many DSD256 files for sale yet, but their numbers are increasing. ![]() The USB input accepts DSD256, but the internal renderer plays only up to DSD128. ![]() For that price, you get a music file renderer (player) and a DAC capable of playing PCM files up to 384kHz/24-bit and DSD files up to DSD128. But the N-05 falls into the mid-range pricing area: $6500. Esoteric makes some of the best SACD/CD players and DACs on the planet, some of which sell at stratospheric prices. It’s Esoteric’s first venture into the file-player/streamer market, so that the disc drive that normally fronts its DACs has been replaced by a file renderer, an ugly-sounding term for the circuit that converts a stored file into a bitstream that the DAC can decode into an analog signal. ![]() The N-05 supports both file-based playback and streaming playback from two major services. Which brings us (finally) to the subject of this review: Esoteric’s new N-05 Network Audio Player. That makes sense it’s far easier just to turn on your equipment, select the music you want to hear from a huge collection, and hit the Play button rather than have to download files and copy them to your storage medium first. The music industry data also tells us that the popularity of file-based music playback is waning, as streaming digital playback improves the sound quality it delivers. It also drastically reduces the size of downloaded files, making the downloading process much faster. Until recently, most streamed files were the lossy compressed variety (e.g., MP3), and even if sound quality was your area of interest, the best quality streaming service readily available was CD quality however, the file encoding technology known as Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) promises to make streamed high-resolution file playback available. Usually, streaming services have huge libraries of music files, which allow you to hear a wide variety of music at various levels of quality. You don’t have to possess any files at all, just subscribe to a service that has access to the files and will send them to you over the Internet when and where you want to play them. Streaming digital playback consists of music played over the Internet. The distinguishing characteristic of file-based music playback is that you must possess the files you play back. Music files can range from extremely high resolution to CD resolution to lossy compressed formats designed to minimize the space needed to store them. To enjoy file-based music playback, you must acquire music files, either by downloading them over the Internet or copying (ripping) them from your CDs. The former, also known as computer audio playback, consists of music stored in digital file format on some sort of storage drive: a spinning hard drive, a solid-state drive (including USB flash drives), or a network drive. In their place have sprung up two alternatives: file-based music playback and streaming digital playback. You’ve probably seen the music industry data: Sales of physical music playback discs (CDs and SACDs) are dropping sharply. ![]()
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