So, my Network Bridge has arrived. I really wasn’t expecting a huge change from what the Bluesound, or indeed the Naim before that had offered. But I was wrong. This thing really does live up to the hype. Everything I have read about this machine has turned out to be true. If you can’t afford one, don’t listen to it.
It’s a pretty innocuous looking thing, with a reassuring weight for its size, because everyone knows that weight equates to good sound, apparently.
I played around with some of the settings and could clearly hear differences in presentation. I don’t care to elaborate much, putting aural experience into written words is not my forte at all, but I have settled on settings that work nicely with my Acoustic Plan Digimaster dac. I am rewarded with a nice wide rich expansive soundscape, with amazing realism and decay where it is warranted. It sounds spectacular. I really have never heard digital music sound as good in my house.
Read the reviews and if you’re curious, go and listen to one.
Whilst the dCS is Roon enabled, I have been using the standard Mosaic app. It’s not perfect, but it is pretty good. Maybe eventually I will spring the shekels for a Roon subscription, but for now I will stick with the dCS app. I have mostly only listened to Tidal so far. My server isn’t running at the moment, because its a bit superfluous now. Tidal Masters encoded in MQA are unwrapped and fed to my dac with no trouble at all.
I’ve also been able to retire the old Yamaha tuner. The radio streams through the Bridge are excellent. It seems like it makes everything you play through it sound good. Maybe it is a tad smooth and it is knocking the rough edges off, who knows.
I guess at this point digital playback should be considered a fairly mature technology, and dCS are at the forefront of that particular niche, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it is as good as it is. I think for me it has put the nail in the coffin of the idea that digital transports all sound the same, and that ones and zeros are just ones and zeros. It’s nice to have confirmed that you really do get what you pay for, and in this case at least, more money has definitely resulted in higher performance.
Audio Satori 
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