Just a few seconds into the first movement one is confronted by gleaming trumpet sounds, wiry piano passages and saucy strings. Such serious challenging fare rectified that suspicion. Here the Pioneer proved far more than the kind of toy its entry-level sticker might predict. The Pioneer N-50 cut a very good figure on classical, say Shostakovich’s Concert for Piano, Trumpet and Strings in C-minor op.35 under Dmitri Alexeev and the English Chamber Orchestra. In general poor or very compressed source material did quite well in Auto Sound Retriever mode by making more palatable those certain oldies which one (cough) still schleps around from those ‘ancient’ Napster days.
With HiBit32 these artefacts reappeared but now stage depth and image localization improved a bit. Even so this was quite pleasing since most of the typical compression artefacts had vanished. the lower ranges put out less volume than the original. The sibilant sizzle and blur in the treble disappeared nearly altogether but the overall tonality of the piece now suffered a bit of color shift, i.e. This had a very noticeable effect, nearly a bit like the newer version of good old Dolby C. Hmm, this was MP3 pure indeed – listenable but particularly in the treble and on decay trails a bit hissy as well as quite uncertain on overall timing. I fired up a 128kbps MP3 file of "Still Belonging to You" and started with Pure Audio. Well, time to fall back on the sonic profiles and hope for different. Of course that was sensible but not everything hifi always is. As much as I tried, I heard no difference between the network and direct CD player feeds. I first fed the N-50 which was hardwired to the router via Ethernet link the uncompressed WAV file of the above Thomas Kessler Group track.
Let’s move on to streaming where I used the Serviio freeware. This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed below
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