High End 2018 • TABlog

by Dennis Davis | May 24, 2018

few years ago, you could walk around a show and find that few systems offered LP or CD playback. Your only choice of media was how the music was streamed. This was never quite so common at the High End show than it was at CES or the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, in part because the European market is perceived to be behind the US by a couple years in adapting to new developments.

But there now seems to be recognition that the rush to substitute streaming for LP or CD playback in high-end audio was a step backward, as the sound of streamed music has offered more promise than fulfillment. There were a handful of systems at the High End show whose source material was limited to streamed music, and these were the exception. That’s not to shun services like Roon, but simply to recognize their place as a very convenient lifestyle product -- something that acts as a very important auxiliary but not a replacement for physical media. I stream music during cooking, housecleaning and other chores where my attention is not focused entirely on what I'm hearing, but I'm sufficiently interested in discovering new music. Little at the show threatened to challenge that diminished expectation for streamed music. A few companies were showing large and very expensive streaming devices, but they were unimpressive as sources.

There were, however, a couple of promising signs of life among the reasonably priced streaming contenders. Roy Gregory will discuss one, the always up-and-coming contender from Cambridge Audio, in more detail in his narrative report. The second product, a new streamer technology from Moon by Simaudio, goes by the name MiND 2, or as I like to think of it, Moon Mind. MiND 2 is the second generation of "Moon intelligent Network Device" (hence MiND). The control center of the application runs from iPad, iPhone or Android device. It both allows you to access, browse and play music and controls various Moon products. It incorporates most of the best-known buzzwords -- Roon, access to Tidal with Tidal Masters support, access to Qobuz and its Sublime+ support, and MQA in Moon DACs. You cannot buy Moon MiND 2 as a standalone product, but only as a MiND meld with Moon products.

While MND 2 is being incorporated into evergreen Moon products, its full functionality is as part of Moon’s newest generation of products, meaning for now the Moon 390 (shown, $5500), Simaudio’s new all-in-one product that functions as a network player, DAC, preamplifier, headphone amplifier and phono stage, available in black, silver or two-tone. Although it is impossible to make any assessment of a technology-driven product like the MiND 2 engine of the Moon 390 at an audio show, what is apparent is that Simaudio has delivered a lot of product for the money and packaged it beautifully.