Laminar Streamer SD Card Player: It’s Digital, Jim, But Not As We Know It

Made from a combination of steel and german Panzerholz wood, this 24kg device plays any .wav or .aiff file from FAT32 formatted SD cards from 44.1 kHz through to 192 kHz files. The company commented that there is,  “…nothing to configure, ever. No buffering, synchronicity, latency or compatibility issues, ever. Nor viruses. Just plug and play the perfect audiophile stream and keep your pristine audio off the noisy grid.”

The small screen displays folder names, file names, sampling rates, absolute phase polarity, playback mode and time ).

In Pure Laminar mode screen data, active position monitoring and back-light are all disengaged. The sole active operation remains the Direct Drive clock-to-data pairing while the Direct Drive OS runs off of the active precision audio clock.

You get an optically decoupled expansion port for future remote control functionality that, says the compan, does not introduce any EM interference to the audio streaming process. Standard outputs include S/PDIF output on RCA, AES/EBU output on XLR and I2S output on 5-pin connector.

The team has produced it’s own OS to operate the Player. This is what the company has to say about it, “For a perfect stream to form, we need the data to be associated with a running audio clock. This is the only function the operating system should have. Everything else will demand processor time, and, hence, will introduce tiny deviations in the perfect timing we need.

What we have managed to do is to create our own audio dedicated operating system which functions exactly off of the very audio clock. This means that when the operating system is functioning (boot time and SD card recognition is less than 0.2 seconds), the data read off of the SD card is directly coupled to the clock’s wavefronts and that is all. The stream is the result of 44,100 such operations per second. And this stream is very close to flawless in the time domain.”

Spanning 423 × 400 × 161, it retails at…wait for it… $91,181.

Meanwhile, a couple of videos for you. HERE is the vibration test on the chassis.

And another VIDEO comparing the sound of the bones in a human hand with the vibration from the chassis.

The company supply whole host of extra information, graphs and videos to support their design views. To learn more, click www.lessloss.com