Grimm Audio MU1 music streamer $10,500 Review
March 8, 2021 § Leave a comment
https://www.stereophile.com/content/grimm-audio-mu1-music-streamer
I had been playing one of my favorite performances of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2, with Vladimir Ashkenazy accompanied by Bernard Haitink conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra (16/44.1 ALAC file ripped from CD, Decca 4757550). An early digital recording—it was released in 1986—the sound via the MU1’s network connection was somewhat congested, with limited soundstage depth. The same recording, upsampled to 176.4kHz and sent to the MBL DAC via the MU1’s AES/EBU connection, was dramatically better. The tonal balance was still warm, but the congestion was reduced, adding depth to the soundstage and increasing the separation between instruments and groups of instruments within that stage. Even lossy-compressed audio, like the 128kbps stream of BBC Radio 3’s Night Tracks program, to which I have become addicted, benefited from the MU1’s upsampling.
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