MERGING+ Range in Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2017, Room # 7025
The MERGING+PLAYER, MERGING+NADAC and MERGING+POWER will be featured in a dedicated room at The Rocky Mountain Audio Festival in Denver. This late decision to take a room at the show was predicated by a change in US distribution and the desire to show the full range of products without conflict from other brands in the same room.
The MERGING+PLAYER offers a single box solution to playing files with Roon. It is offered in stereo or multichannel variants to cater for the former SACD enthusiasts, who can listen to the multichannel files as they should be heard. Since Roon 1.3, multichannel DSD playback has been implemented and this was a direct result of the Merging/Roon partnership which is ongoing with the intention to introduce other new features in the future.
The room will be staffed by Chris Hollebone, Sales and Marketing Manager of Merging, Fraser Jones, President of Independent Audio and Michael Broughton of The Audiophile Source who will be working his magic in setting up the room. Independent Audio is based in Portland, Maine and has been Merging's professional distributor for many years. The company has an enviable track record of managing logistics and technical support throughout the USA and Merging is confident that the change will suit the dealer network.
RMAF will be the first North American demonstration of the MERGING+POWER. Reviewers have been unanimous in praising the excellent audio quality of the MERGING+PLAYER and MERGING+NADAC, so that would indicate that the designers did a fine job with the power supply. There is a body of opinion that maintains that removing all AC components from the chassis should improve the performance even more. MERGING+POWER is the answer. The unique hybrid design mixes switch mode and analog toroidal transformer technology to separate the different requirements of the key internal components. All major parts of the power plant meet aerospace or military specifications and have been selected to offer the ultimate in sonic integrity. MERGING+POWER is a product designed to add magic to excellence for the most discerning users.
The advantages of using Ethernet were plainly obvious to other DAC and server manufacturers and there has been much interest in how this could be incorporated into their products. The Aurender X100 Digital Music Player will be connected to the network to show the versatility that this can bring to the home. This product takes advantage of Merging's LINUX Virtual Audio Device which can be adopted by other devices using the same operating system. Merging has also developed drivers for OSX and Windows to ensure that RAVENNA can be used with any computer platform. Merging will soon be introducing ZMan, a new compact and powerful RAVENNA circuit board which will be offered to OEM partners, bringing the advantages of a networked solution to audio components as diverse as loudspeakers, DACs and server/streamers. In addition to RAVENNA, this board will allow for a whole range of other capabilities like Roon Ready support, streaming services and DSP processing for advanced formats decoding or room correction.
