Although details on what this filter entails were scarce, Eelco did mention several times that he felt analog artifacts were less perceptually unpleasant than digital and that this was a key factor during the development of this unit. To keep the technical Jabberwocky speech to a minimum, the Grimm Audio MU1 via its AES output is basically taking over the initial oversampling of the music from the DACs input, as it is equipped with much greater CPU resources and what Grimm believe is a superior filter.
#New musicserver code
Grimm has gone to great lengths to customize and code their own chip, and its capabilities are far in advance of a typical Sharc DSP or off the shelf chip-they’re also atrociously expensive to develop. The jitter problem requires sophisticated clock design, which the Grimm Audio MU1 provides for via its S/PDIF and AES outputs, and the filter requires a dedicated and custom-programmed FPGA, which outputs via the AES connection on the MU1. While the article doesn’t go into particularly great detail about how the filters are constructed or what they look like, the basic gist is that low jitter and high-power CPU are needed for accurate resampling to occur. Suffice to say that in my wide-ranging and informative conversation with Eelco, he demonstrated a very sophisticated knowledge of all these technical points, and the Grimm website contains a concise and well written article about their Pure Nyquist Filters. I know, it would make my eyes glaze over if I wasn’t a complete nerd either. FIR, windowing and buffer size, latency… blah-blah-blah. Aliasing, pre and post-ringing, phase shift, IIR vs. Many fussy mastering engineers will actually render it at less than realtime speeds to achieve best results, in iZotope RX and some even more obscure programs.Ī key element of resampling is the reconstruction filter, and many of you will be familiar with talk of reconstruction filters and up or oversampling as it relates to DAC technology. The process of turning 44.1khz into 96khz or 192khz is nontrivial, and although it may seem simple, to do it well and with the best sound quality actually requires quite a bit of processing power. I’ll try not to bore you with too many technical details, but suffice to say that resampling is a fairly sophisticated and complex science requiring lots of CPU, and well-tuned filters.
Where it gets interesting is the AES outputs’ filter. Via USB, optical or any other transmission method, this is fairly standard, though the power supply in the MU1 is made of exceptionally premium parts. You plug it in, it sends audio to your DAC. Regarding the Grimm Audio MU1, our discussions centered around one central point, which was essentially that this is a very straightforward music server. Our conversation was wide-ranging and quite fun, and I hope to get a listen to other Grimm Audio products someday.
#New musicserver pro
Grimm as a product company has deep roots in pro audio, with Eelco himself having quite a bit of experience in pro audio as well as recording pedigree and talent within the company. If “ perfection” (and the pursuit thereof) or “ cost-no-object” are phrases that you identify with however, read on.Īlthough my conversation with Eelco didn’t involve any of these words, the prices Grimm Audio is asking for their equipment speaks volumes.
Additionally, I probably ought to mention here that if “ value” or “ affordable” is amongst the words you find yourself using to describe your audio shopping habits, you may be disappointed. I want to first mention however that my discussion with Eelco was simultaneously refreshing and challenging. I had an extensive discussion with Eelco Grimm shortly after receiving this piece, and the main thrust of our discussion, though not about the MU1 specifically, involved digital filtering. While power supplies and other increasingly subtle tweaks regarding how the digital signal gets to the DAC are not beyond my personal realm of expertise-keep an eye out for a piece on an interesting Innuos piece coming soon-I do also know quite a bit about signal transmission and filters. Hard to mess that up, right? Words and Photos by Grover Neville
#New musicserver software
They use Roon or some other software to manage digital streaming services and files and they send music files to digital converters. This is not a term I typically associate with music servers or digital sources-the truth of the matter is that most of them are simple devices. The Grimm Audio MU1 ( website) is an idiosyncratic product.
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