Bricasti

Design

M5

50 AustralianHi-Fi http://www.aushifi.com

on test

Network

Player

P

icture this scenario: You’re

very happy with the carefully

curated hi-fi system you’ve

spent years putting togeth-

er. You’re in love with your

loudspeakers, you’re proud of

the pre/power combo that’s

driving them, and you’re delighted with your

DAC. But you have this problem. You’ve been

inveigled by the internet, with its promise

of streamed music, downloadable music, all

with the cherry-topped inducement of high

resolution. Have you seen the problem yet?

Yes, the problem is how do you interface your

beloved system with the IOT? Indeed, how

do you even interface it with your computer

and the music files stored there-in...or some-

where thereabouts (and here I’m thinking

servers and NAS drives).

The solution to this scenario is the Bricasti

Design M5 Network Player... except that

it’s not really a ‘player’ because it doesn’t

actually ‘play’ anything at all. It just acts as

an intermediary between a high-end audio

system and anything at all computer-like. It

keeps your computer, your home network...

even the Internet, at arm’s length from your

carefully curated hi-fi system. Indeed, to

use Bricasti Design’s own description: ‘it is

a network interface and media renderer that

connects to your server via a local area network.

With wide support for DLNA and other popular

network protocols, the M5 delivers pristine

lossless audio from your network to your digital

to analogue converter so that your music server

can go anywhere you choose. The M5 connects to

your LAN via Ethernet then provides SPDIF and

AES outputs that support PCM with sample rates

up to 192kHz, as well as DSD64 and DSD128

over USB.’

No need to worry about music file format

support either, because the Bricasti Design

M5 supports more than 100 different types,

including AAC, AIFF, ALAC, ATRAC, Au,

AVI, Dolby Digital, DSDiff, DSF, DV, DVD,

FLAC, FLV, IFF, M1V, M2T, M2V, M4A, M4V,

Matroska, MJPEG, Monkey’s Audio, MP1,

MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, Music Tracker files,

Ogg, OpenMG, Opus, Quicktime, RealMedia

and RealAudio, Sidplayer files, Speex, SWF,

video game media files, W64, WAV, WMV

and WMA, Xvid, 3GPP and 3GPP2.

The Bricasti Design M5 is also fully DNLA,

UPnP and Roon compatible, so no matter

what media software you’re running, it will

recognise the M5 when it’s connected to your

network and play to it. The important thing

to note here is that the audio is rendered in

the M5 and not in the server, so the actual

digital audio files can be stored anywhere at

all. I’d personally recommend you use Roon.

Bricasti Design also recommends Roon, but

suggests that if you want a low-cost alterna-

tive, you instead use JRiver Media Centre.

Bricasti Design’s Owner’s Manual makes it

quite clear as to the reason the M5 was devel-

oped. It says (and I am quoting here directly

from the manual, because I don’t want to

put my own slant on Bricasti Design’s design

aims): ‘The intention of the M5 is to provide

state of the art playback and transfer of digital

audio data from your network attached drive or

anywhere on the network the audio is stored.

In this scheme the audio is then “rendered” or

streamed as real-time audio in the M5, then sent

to the passive digital outputs, the AES or SPDIF.

This approach removes the host server computer

from the actual playing of the audio and elimi-

nates typical issues found, such as noise gener-

ated from PC power supplies and switch mode

voltage regulators in the computer, plus noise