Multi purpose audio server

 Digital media is no doubt the current trend of things in almost all of our daily lives. In audio world this is not exception. Many have tried to tap into the benefit digital media can offer for audio and is very common this days to see streaming as the source. Many brands have come out with different kind of solution to digital playback no matter is physical media or streaming. It is always a dream to have many different features or  functions that can be found in one box. Is not doubt value for money is one key consideration on media box. Myself have personally like CD very much but don't quite like to have a CD player. My alternate option is to have a digital player to play the CD that has been ripped into wav files or other file format. Of course consideration of storage as well but price for storage is very affordable. Not much of concern. As I was looking for storage, I came across this Japanese company IO-Data (https://www.iodata.jp/fidata/en/) . Its a company that produces hard disk and storage. What is interesting about the company is it takes interest in audio. The company has developed some very high end storage for the sole purpose of audio quality. Being high end the price is also a premium. Not exactly something I was looking for. Looking further in the company product, I came across a more affordable product which is also very interesting with all its functions. (https://www.iodata.jp/ssp/soundgenic/en/). The product is a network server and storage named Soundgenic. After watching some review on youtube and it does look very promising. I took the plunge as it is available in Malaysia.

I made the order and is send from Japan. The thing to take note is this unit is from Japan its all in Japanese language only. The international version will have English language. A little of a bummer but no big deal. The good news is the mobile apps for this server is all in English. 😁 This is a 2 TB model of the network storage server. This is the lowest spec model out of total of 4 different models offer from IO-Data. With some discount I bought online, it came to about RM1300 include shipping. This model has the usual 2TB hard disk and other model come with SSD drive. As a start for me I think this will do. 

Out from the box this looks very simple as a black box. The company name in front with Hi-Res audio sticker. No display of any kind except on the top right corner has a small LED light for indicator if the unit is turn on. 

On the back is all the connections. From the left is the power with 12V DC input. The next port is the usual LAN port that support 1000mbps. Than it has 2 USB ports with USB 2 and USB 3. There is the hard reset button and follow by the power button. Is pretty simple and the unit is design as headless unit with controls all on mobile apps which is supported by Android and Apple. The unit is pretty much just plug and play. The one thing to take note is the unit need a LAN cable for it to work as this is also a NAS storage itself. There is no WIFI for this unit which I think it make sense.

To setup is very straight forward. First thing is to install the mobile apps of Fidata and connect the soundgenic to your home network via the LAN cable port. Once is turn on, it will be auto recognized by your network as a network storage device. The storage can be accessible from your normal windows or mac machines as a network drive. Pretty much can copy anything into the storage as if this is a normal hard disk on the network. Once the files are inside the storage , it can be use any other devices within the same network.

With the fidata apps, there are a lot more you can do with the soundgenic. First thing, you can do is use it as a player. From the picture above, it looks quite typical kind of player. You can use the Apple airplay or normal bluetooth to playback from your mobile devices through the player even with Spotify Connect. Of course playback from the hard disk in the soundgenic is also one other option. How this is output will be through the USB port. The USB can be connected to external DAC of your hifi component. The USB port is also able to connect with external USB hard drive.

What is the important or attraction for me is the USB optical drive supported by the unit. In this case, I have a USB optical drive connected to the soundgenic. This means, it will now be a CD player too with the external drive. The feature I really wanted is the ability to ripped the CD into the hard disk without any software or control. Once you pop in the CD, the soundgenic will automatically ripped the songs from the CD into WAV or FLAC of your choice. The cover art and information is all automatically populated as well as the unit is also using your internet for this purpose. Once the files are ripped you can share it to any other devices within your network. 

Overall this is all in one box for all the things pretty much needed for the need of digital audio. For the price and what it can offer in features, I will think is very hard to beat. This is all made in Japan comparing to many Chinese made products in the market that are on the same price range. The sound quality playback from the unit itself is also remarkable. I personally compare it with my Asus Tinker board with Volumio playback to be almost on par. This is definitely a worthy investment for a good quality audio playback and storage.

CCY Engineering F7 Power Amp Part 1.5 - An "Unofficial" First Listen

When Chong, the head honcho of CCY Engineering, told me about his "preorder price" for the F7 power amp, an idea flashed through my mind. I couldn't resist the urge to test the idea out. So here we have this write-up, which I call "Part 1.5", as it is a detour from my usual practice of testing out equipment in my dedicated room, with the system set up in a more conventional "audiophile-approved" way.  

The F7's is going for RM 1,688 now (refer to part 1 here for technical spec of the amp). To get a class A amp at this price point must rank as a bargain. My idea was that as a lot of people are spending a lot of  time working from home at this time of pandemic, me included, wouldn't it be cool if I could set up a cost-effective but good sounding system in my home office, capable of providing a high level of musical satisfaction while operating in a normal work space (i.e., not specifically set up/treated for HiFi). For me, my work-from-home arrangement is done from a spare bedroom in my home.

For this experiment, I paired the F7 with equipment and cables I already had. For source duty, I went back to my old but still fine-sounding Marantz DV-7001 universal player (I play CDs, still am not firmly in the streaming crowd yet). 

For pre-amp, I pressed into duty the Chinese passive preamp that I bought awhile ago, which I wanted to use with my Pass Labs Aleph 3 (while hoping I could find a used unit of the Aleph 3's matching preamp the Aleph L). This passive no-name preamp is minimalist in that it operates only on an Alps potentiometer and comes with only 1 input and 1 output.

The speakers were the Mission M30i which my kid no longer used. The Missions were 'cute' speakers (i.e., small), so I didn't expect them to give me room-filling sound, but I didn't need that too in my circumstance. 

I put the system on a Ikea table opposite my workstation. Again no fancy and not even basic HiFi furniture. Give the elongated shape of the F7, I didn't have enough real estate on the table top to fit in the Marantz player, so I placed it underneath the table (again, this would not have been an audiophile approved thingy to do).

All the partnering equipment added up costing less than the F7 itself, except the Marantz player when new, but I think a DVD player would have lost a significant chunk of its value by now too. 

So, from an audiophile point of view, the F7 had many things stacked against it. 

Anyway, I wanted to see whether I could enjoy some music while I work, with a system costing about, I would say, RM3k - RM4k.

The initial listening revealed a problem with this arrangement. The sound was congested and blurred in the upper bass and lower mid regions. I thought t could be caused by the driver configuration on the Mission speakers, which is inverted (bass/mid driver on top, the tweeter below), putting the tweeter way below my ear height, the height differential was further exacerbated by my close range listening position which was just about 1.5m away. I decided to improvise by tilting the front baffle of the speakers up a little, and found a satisfying solution with the speakers' front lifted about 1 cm from the table top by slotting a CD case underneath it (again, this would not be audiophile-approved way). Anyway, the tilt largely resolved the congestion issue, what remained I thought could be addressed by increasing the spread distance between the 2 speakers, to do that I'd need to put them on proper speaker stands, but I got lazy 😁. 

The CCY F7 ran hot, its I-beam chassis was very warm to the touch once it was fully warmed up and stabilized (a 1 hour period should be good enough, just like my other class A Pass Labs amps), though I think it did not get as hot as my Aleph 3 amp.

After a few days' listening, I got a handle of this system's capability. Limited by the small Missions, it could not handle loudness and scale to my satisfaction, it played best with simpler music. However, that does not mean that it could work only with slow and languid music, on the contrary, the sound was lively and dynamic contrast was very good, it was definitely not a snooze-inducing listen. What really surprised me was a good measure of the sound characteristics in the mid and high regions that made me fell in love with my first Pass Labs amp, the Aleph 3 (Class A 30 watts).  

I never heard music coming out of the Mission 30i like this, especially in the mid and high. I heard a satisfying level of transparency and separation in the sound (other than the little residual congestion in the bass region I attributed to the speakers), the high was clean and quite smooth and devoid of harshness and undue sharpness. I credited the CCY F7 for all this.    

Below is a iPhone SE recording of this system playing a track from this Itzhak Perlman  / Pinchass Zukerman album, track 7 Jean-Marie Leclair Sonata Op 3 No 4 first movement - Allegro assai.

This is a track with 2 violins. From the clip, you could hear that the music presentation was lively and had a good amount of nuances, the violin tone was quite naturally portrayed, and the interplay between the 2 violins made the track an interesting listen (if you hear some humming noise from the beginning of the clip, that is the hum from my air-cond compressor from outside the room window).

Next up is an excerpt of Joni Mitchell's "Urge for Going", she sung with just a guitar accompaniment. There was a trace of natural warmth in this replay that was reminiscent of my past experience with other class A amps that I found quite appealing.

I like the CCY F7 a lot from this 'unofficial' first listen. Its sound is pristine and smooth, and the music presentation is alive. I shall put it through a more challenging pace in my listening room next, with much more capable speakers.

CCY Engineering's facebook page https://web.facebook.com/CcyEngineering-109995560498110

The Giant Subs

Subwoofer or subs which most audio enthusiast will called. Everyone who into home theater or Hifi will not need introduction to a sub. Is a boom box so to called it. I am going to focus on this sub in a home theater setup. I call this sub a monster that I have recently change to. This sub which is non other than the JL Audio F212 V2 dual drivers subwoofer. 

The subs as from the picture is quite a tall subwoofer standing at 81cm, is like half size floor stander speaker. It also weight 102 kg. This is good enough reason to called it a monster sub. Each of the driver is a 12 inches ultra long throw W7 drivers. The power is 3600 watts RMS for this beast. It have both balanced ((XLR/TRS Combo) and unbalanced connections.

From the front panels left to right , power switch, daro connection, room optimzation (demo, defeat, calibrate). 2 LED indicators (Master/Slave), level mode, master volume, lights dim, low pass filter, trim, phase and polarity. This features are handy for calibration.

This are some of the accessories included in the box. One pair of gloves, the calibration mic and 4 pieces of sliders. This is very useful tool. It is use to slide under the foot of the subwoofer to allow easier moving of the sub sliding on the floor. I cannot imagine carrying this 102kg moving about in the room. I will give an extra point to JL Audio on this small accessory which is a big help.

A picture for comparison a floor stander speaker to the subwoofer. One good thing about having a sub like this is saving some floor space. Is like having 2 subs stack up. Thinking back before I was having 2 large SVS subwoofers is really taking up lots of floor space. This is a positive point for me. 

Digital Automatic Room Optimization (D.A.R.O.) system as the name suggest is a build in auto calibration on the subwoofer. I will describe as similar to how a mic is connected to an AVR and run the auto calibration. Basically is the same but this is done specific for bass management. As this is setup for home theater purpose, after running the DARO will than run the auto calibration in the AVR as follow up to complete the setup.

This is the graph from REW on the bass response. Blue line is the before applying any EQ to it. The redline is with EQ to flatten it. This is pretty amazing given the fact that this is just 1 subwoofer vs previously of dual SVS ultra subwoofers. Now the movie experience is with "kick". The bass slam is pretty real right smack to the viewer. Totally enjoying it. 

CCY Engineering F7 Power Amp Part 1 - An Introduction

Here we have another hifi product designed and made in Malaysia, this time it is a power amplifier. 

What excites me about this amplifier is its design. Its topology, as I understand from Mr. Chong the head honcho of CCY Engineering, borrows heavily from Nelson Pass' design in his First Watt F7 model. I am a big Pass Labs fan since its Aleph days (I still have an Aleph 3 power amp in my collection) and am a very happy user of a pair of XA160.5 monoblocks. However, we don't come across First Watt much, if at all, in Malaysia, as it doesn't have a local distributor/dealer, but I have long desired to listen to a First Watt amplifier. 

So, when I heard that CCY was making a power amplifier based on a First Watt design, my interest was piqued. A friend bought one of the early CCY F7 units coming out of CCY Engineering. He allowed me to hijack it for a while to do this series of write-up/reviews (Lim, thanks!). The unit was duly delivered to my place by Mr. Chong himself a few days ago. In this first write-up I would like to touch on its design and I'll cover its sound performance in the next few articles. 

As far as I could ascertain, the CCY F7 amplifier is the second amplifier coming out of CCY Engineering. This second amp continues with the creative, unique, idiosyncratic and almost whimsical chassis design of the first amplifier (the CCY A2450), with the colour of faceplate changed from red on the previous model to black. 

From the photo you can see that the amplifier, uniquely, uses an I-beam as its main body, giving it an elongated, slightly-longer-than-a-shoe-box shape. The circuit board is attached to the underside of the central plate of the I-beam, with the metal plate itself acting pretty much as a heat sink, which is an important necessity as the CCY F7 is a Class A amp.  

The back of the amp is pretty straightforward, it has a IEC power inlet, a pair of RCA input, and a pair of loudspeaker output which, not very conveniently for me, takes only banana plugs as I'd prefer spade which offers a tighter and more secured contact for amp and loudspeaker, I feel.

You would also notice that the amp does not come with a power on/off switch. This is not much of an issue if you can switch the amp on or off at the wall. But if you can't, e.g., if the amp is plugged into a power conditioner that is shared with other equipment, CCY includes with the F7 an umbilical cord with a massive power switch, which your powercord can then plug into. 

First Watt amplifiers are pretty much niche products, they produce low output power (less than 25 watts into 8 ohms), but have relatively high power consumption and run hot, as they are Class A amplifiers. The CCY F7 is no exception to this Class A mould. While First Watt has not published the F7 schematics officially, as it is still one of the current models in its lineup, Chong has based his F7 version on information and high resolution photos and images of the First Watt F7 on the internet.

Chong told me the following about the CCY F7 amp, I quote:

"Topology highlights -

1. This is a push-pull class A amp, running on negative feedback, the uniqueness is that it also applies some amount of positive current feedback from the output captured right AFTER the speaker load back to the input.

As speaker impedance changes across the music bandwidth, the lower the impedance goes, the higher the positive feedback sent back and superimposed with the input, here’s the magic of the F7.

 Build highlights:

1. Dual Mono setup, left and right channels are electrically isolated.

2. All-in-one PCB Layout, no flying wires on any connector other than the transformer.

3. Input stage with NOS Toshiba JFETs 2SJ74/2SK170

4. Output stage with Exicon Lateral Mosfets ECX10N20/ECX10P20

5. O-shape Toroid Transformer

6. DC offset Relay speaker Protection.

7. A total of 144,000uF(72,000uF/channel) capacitance with CRC configuration at Power supply.

 Specifications:

1. 20W @ 8ohm / 30w @ 4ohm

2. Gain 14dB

3. Input Impedance @ ~25k ohm

4. Output Impedance @ ~0.4 ohm"

The underbelly of the CCY F7 is protected with a wire mesh, the circuit is visible through it. Better photos of the innards can be seen on CCY Engineering's facebook page https://web.facebook.com/CcyEngineering-109995560498110. Here is a photo I found on the FB page, with the big O-shape toroidal transformer seen to the front of the amp:

My immediate task now is to run it for a short while, as it is new out of the box, then do some serious listening. I'll do my listening sessions with some speakers that are commensurate with the CCY F7's price point and will also throw something more challenging at it to see how it will fare. 

I'll share some background of CCY Engineering's founder Mr Chong, together with my listening impression of the amp in my next few write-ups. Stay tuned.