54 Australian Hi-Fi http://www.aushifi.com
INtervIew
IntervIew
Brian Zolner BricastiDesign
B
rian Zolner is the ‘Bri’ in
Bricasti Design, a company
founded by two former
employees of Lexicon,
joined subsequently by
engineers from Madrigal
Laboratories. Here, he talks to Jez
Ford about the Bricasti M5 reviewed
on page 50 of this issue...Jez Ford: So tell us about your Bricasti
M5 Network Player...
Brian Zolner: So we have the M5 which
we announced a year ago, but we also
launched before that the M12. And the idea
of the M12 was what I call a source control-
ler; it has analogue in, digital ins, so it’s a
nice front-end for somebody, a preamp/DAC.
And we developed the network rendering
streaming interface for that product, and
designed that card—the physical shape of
it, how it mounts—so it could be retrofitted
into any M1. So it fits in the M12, it can be
put into an M1 or M1 DAC, so people can
upgrade if they want, or they can order it
with that.
Then I realised I could put that network
rendering streaming interface in its own little
box. So the M5 is this little box with the ana-
logue power supply out of the M1 powering
the network interface, and that drops down
to a card we made that has a SHARC (pro-
cessor) on it, and with AES and SPDIF out.
Because the real idea of the product was not
to use USB, the whole advantage is saying
‘let’s do this without USB’, OK? So this M5
can sit close to the system, or it could be
further away because it’s going to go SPDIF
or AES; it can go halfway around the room,who cares? And the computer is hidden back
here or in the other room, another part of
your house; who cares where, the network
takes it.
JF: And that you see as important for
convenience or for electrical separation?
BZ: Well the whole idea of this, from my
perspective, from when I start to make these
things, is that I make them for myself. And
I said, you know, I don’t want that damned
computer near me, and I don’t want to
spend a pile of money on some server thing
that’s just a computer in a box that sits there
and you’re back to USB. Because you want
to get that out, and if it’s USB you can’t,
it’s got to be close. So the M5 allows you
to take from wherever your source is—it
happens to be this laptop for the show, or
in my home it sits up on the second floor of
my house—and I play it remotely from here.
I use JRiver because I like JRemote [the JRiver
remote app for tablet or phone] but you can
use other apps—you can have an app just
on your phone and then the phone becomes
the library manager... Bubble or mConnect,
you can do all these things. So the idea is to
get this out of your listening environment,
clean it all up, get that noisy drive, all that
crap out of the way. And then the advantage
comes also in that the M5 is a product that
anybody can use, with the same features—
DLNA, Roon Ready, UPnP device—and it
comes out AES or SPDIF, or USB.
JF: So explain why you think USB has
problems; a lot of us play USB from our
computer. Can you explain the problems
with that?
BZ: Well... this all gets very, sort-of, sub-
jectively audiophile craziness.JF: Well, that’s fine, because I do that.
BZ: [Laughs.] OK, you know, one would
say it shouldn’t matter, right? And I think
technically from the pure data point of
view it probably doesn’t matter, depend-
ing on how things are done. But I believe
the issue with USB is that first it’s not really
made to do this. USB was really meant to
be a thumb drive or just a point-to-point
thing. It’s not meant for real-time transfer.
What’s going on in the network now is not
real-time. It’s pulling a drive, buffering it
and playing it. So it’s not real-time stream-
ing of audio. Now you take an interface and
you’re trying to do that. Of course it can be
done... and was done.
But also I think the issue resides in
the fact that the interface needs to be
powered. And that power has to come
from the computer, because that’s how it’s
supposed to work. So you have, you know,
even in our M1 and all our products, we
galvanically isolate that from the product.
But nonetheless it’s all in there, right? So
you have to say, OK what has it done on
hearing.
And my experimentation and research
tells me it has to do with power. Because I
used to take my computer, plug it in, and
if it ran it on the battery I could hear a
difference. It’s better. Got rid of the hash.
Not all of it, but a lot of it. OK. Then you
have another level of hash which is the
motherboard in any computer, I don’t
care—any board you buy, unless you do it
like we did in the M5, where we made a
small card with an ARM processor running
a Linux core. That’s what an ARM processor
is for, to say ‘reduced instruction set’—it’s
only going to do what you stick on it. In
the computer world there’s things doing
all kinds of shit, because it’s got to support
it—not that it doesn’t work, it works fine.
But you have all these different voltages
that are being regulated because the power
comes into a laptop or something at 19
volts, you’ve got to get five volts out for
this, you’ve got to get all the one volts,
three volts for the digital things inside the
computer all the time.
So all of this has to be regulated, and
it’s all done with digital regulation because
you’re not going to do it in analogue—I can
tell you that, because I know what I face
with our products as we run everything
analogue! If you run the digital part with
an analogue supply, you know, suddenly “it
doesn’t work, it crapped out on me, what
happened?” Well the voltage dropped,
sorry, that’s why you use a switch-mode