JBL 4329P

INTEGRATED LOUDSPEAKER SYSTEM

- John Atkinson

Hi-fi is at a crossroads. One road takes us toward modernized versions of the gear we grew up with, stuff that has been around since the 1950s. The other road faces the future. While sometimes accommodating physical media, including vinyl records, that's not where that road leads. On that road, streaming is the norm, and equipment may be hooked up with traditional signal cables or with no cables at all, just GHzrange electromagnetic radiation, the digital kind. In the more extreme cases, the music may remain digital all the way to the amplifiers, which themselves are likely to be class-D.

I keep a foot on both paths, hoping they don't diverge so much that they split me in two.¹ I've got a substantial collection of physical discs, black and silver, and I play them often. But I love the convenience of my network-attached storage (NAS) appliance, Qobuz, even lossy Spotify, especially when I want my world filled with music for hours with no thought or action on my part.

I do still play CDs-I wasn't lying when I wrote that-but many of my CDs sit on shelves collecting dust because I long ago extracted their data, now stored as lossless rips on a NAS. I listen to those more often, played back on my dCS Bartók streamer/DAC, mostly via the dCS Mosaic app. It's the same for LPs: Some still get spun occasionally, but many of them have been ripped-needle-dropped, digitized, and loaded into the NAS. They get "spun" far more often in that form.

We all have roots in the past; that's the nature of things. But new technology is cool, and the future is streaming and wireless. I try to stay curious and, as I said, to travel both roads.