Digital Processor Reviews

The High End is a tidily ordered world. There are CD players, transports, and processors used to play stereo recordings and drive stereo preamplifiers. There are stereo or mono amplifiers used to drive a pair of speakers. And then there is the British high-end company Meridian, run by one J. Robert Stuart, one of audio's deeper thinkers and a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society. Meridian does it their way. They put their amplifiers inside their speakers. Heck, Meridian even puts their D/A processors inside their speakers when they can. And two speakers to play back stereo recordings? Meridian believes in re-creating the original soundfield no matter how many speakers and channels it takes to do it right. And they do it sufficiently successfully that their Digital Theatre system, which does all of the above, was one of Stereophile's joint Home Theater products of 1995. [See also the 2000">http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/201/">2000 review of their Series 800 Digital Theatre.—Ed.]

A reader recently asked if I preferred listening to loudspeakers or to headphones. There is no easy answer: Although I do most of my music listening through speakers, about 10% of that listening, for various reasons, takes place in the privacy of my headphones. I have also found that, since I purchased the Audeze LCD-X headphones following my review of them last March, I now tend to watch movies on my MacBook Pro, with the soundtrack reproduced by these headphones plugged into an AudioQuest DragonFly or whatever D/A headphone amplifier has been passing through my test lab. So when Meridian's PR person, Sue Toscano, asked me last Christmas if I'd be interested in reviewing the English company's new Prime D/A headphone amplifier ($2000) with its optional Prime Power Supply ($1295), it took me less than a New York minute to say "Yes."

As I mentioned in my review eight years ago of Meridian Audio's 808.2 Signature Reference CD player, I have long been impressed by the British company's components—in fact, ever since the early 1980s, when I purchased a Meridian 101 preamplifier, followed by my very positive experiences with Meridian's MCD Pro and 208 CD players, 518 digital audio processor, D600 and DSP8000 digital active loudspeakers, and, most recently, the Prime and Explorer D/A headphone amplifiers.

I was lying on a mattress on the floor of an empty apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Not as grim as it sounds—it's a nice apartment, and the mattress was new, and had just been delivered—but it was hot (no air-conditioning), and my family and my furniture were still in my condo up in Maine, and I was lonely. I needed some cheering up. Which is how I rationalized the decision to buy an Explorer², Meridian Audio's tiny, inexpensive ($299) digital-to-analog converter.

When I survey the realms of fancy-pants audio, the first thing I notice are cohorts of luxury-brand manufacturers selling pride of ownership with emblematic faceplates. After that, I spot another type of manufacturer, one that mocks the first type and aims its products at a younger, more working-class demographic, seducing potential customers with how much "truth" they are offering for only $15. But sometimes, when I look beyond the full-page ads and big rooms at audio shows, I discover a rogue manufacturer that is peddling a very specific type of listening experience, which they believe is the best. A listening experience only they could have created. I am grateful for manufacturers like this. They make my job more interesting, and I admire them for their courage in betting on their own taste in music reproduction.

I am relating these observations because this month I'm reviewing a digital converter from an off-the-paved-road audio manufacturer named Benjamin Zwickel. He operates a company called Mojo Audio, which is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

No fewer than eight boxes, powered by six after-market power cables, comprise my current reference front-end. As much as separate boxes can afford superior isolation and provide far more room for visionary engineers to work their magic, the advantages of a single box, which requires a single power cable and far fewer after-market interconnects, are obvious.

Enter Simaudio's Moon 891 network player/preamplifier ($25,000; footnote 2). Also called a "streaming preamplifier,"it includes a DAC that converts PCM and MQA files up to 32/384 (with 24-bit files upconverted to 32-bit) and DSD files up to 256. It also includes what Simaudio company co-owner Costa Koulisakis describes as "a fully configurable" MC/MM phono stage. Both theoretically and practically, it's an ideal solution for someone with space and/or budget constraints.

Simaudio saw disc-based digital audio in its rear-view mirror at least as far back as 2011, when it introduced the Moon Evolution 650D and 750D—two iterations of what it called a "digital-to-analog converter CD transport." These were actually multiple-input CD players, but Simaudio was evidently so eager to distance itself from the spinning disc that it went with a product category that, in spite of its cumbersome, run-on name, drew a clean line between the disc-reading and signal-processing functions—while bestowing upon the former second-class citizenship.