Auralic Altair

D/A Processor.

Now that we’ve entered a world of post-disc audio (sorry, AnalogPlanet.com), audiophile streaming and file-playback products have appeared by the hundreds, and many companies are on their second, third, or even fourth generation models.

The Chinese company Auralic Limited has been pushing bits around for seven years, releasing a half-dozen streaming and network devices. Their newest, the Altair, combines in a single package the functions of a DAC, streamer, and headphone amplifier with volume control, allowing it also to operate as an all-digital-system preamplifier. Just add power amp and speakers.

Auralic also makes standalone streamers, DACs, and headphone amps, but adding those separate boxes would result in spending several times the Altair’s relatively modest price of $1899. The company claims that the separate boxes do offer more, and that the Altair is not simply a mashup of their Aries wireless streaming bridge and Vega DAC. But I was curious to see what might have trickled down from those pricier separates while offering this much capability for a relative modest outlay of cash.

Inside the Box

The heart of the Altair is a computer: a proprietary hardware platform, called Tesla and developed by Auralic for their Aries streamers, sitting on a removable board that includes a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor running at 1GHz, 1GB of DDR3 onboard memory, and 4GB of system storage. Auralic claims that this hardware will make it possible for the Altair to be upgraded for such planned features as DSD upsampling, MQA, and room-optimization software.

Also inside the Altair is its dual-frequency Femto Master Clock, which drives an ESS Sabre DAC chip. Auralic says that the dual-frequency approach lets them optimize the clock to sampling rates at multiples of both 44.1 and 48kHz.