Can the Stream deliver on the considerable promise it offers and bring streaming transports to a wider audience? Let’s plug it in and find out. Given that it is a first attempt at the same time, this is a fairly ambitious thing to be doing. The Stream is a very bold attempt to simplify some of those complexities and - as is the way that iFi goes about doing things - to deliver it at a ‘category killer’ price tag. With the proliferation of digital inputs on everything, this would seem like a very logical way of going about things but - it comes with additional complexities too. Instead of being a self-contained streamer, the Stream contains the network audio hardware but outputs a digital signal to be decoded elsewhere. This is because the Stream is part of a category of product that is still in the early stages of its existence and might yet not become truly mainstream (it wouldn’t be the first time that a really good idea hasn’t quite captured the public’s imagination).
Unlike the Mk2 versions of the Zen products that we have been looking at of late, the Stream is all new and has no predecessor either in the Zen range or anywhere else in the iFi line up.
This is an exciting collection of words that needs a little in the way of explanation to fully cover what it can do (and we’ll do that, don’t worry). The iFi Audio Zen Stream is a network streaming transport.
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