Aeon

The 432 EVO Aeon is our server directly below the top of the line Master model. The Aeon shares several features with our flagship model and is at a more affordable price point. Even so, it easily surpasses many other similarly priced digital sources, sounding closer to high end analogue with no hint of digital harshness. The Aeon can be upgraded later to the Master. The Aeon was developed from our 432 EVO High-End model, taking the design further. It shares the dual power supply setup from Sbooster, but with a high quality SOtM superclock board for optimised USB output. The Aeon also has additional core specific software tuning to minimize jitter, and all audio processing now runs on a dedicated core. The Aeon runs full Roon or Logitech Media Server and our sublime 432 Hz enabled player, which can also play bit perfect to the highest possible quality. It also features a bit perfect Teac CD drive for ripping your CD collection.

432 Hz tuning

432 Hz is one of the ways to tune musical instruments, and is also known as the Tuning Note “A” and A = 432. Music tuned to 432 Hz sounds better than contemporary music which is tuned at A = 440. The famous Stradivarius for example was tuned to 432 Hz according to the Verdi tuningDuring historical periods when instrumental music rose in prominence (relative to the voice), there was a continuous tendency for pitch levels to rise, also known as the pitch inflation. A higher pitch such as our current A = 440 standard sounds sharper, louder and more “fresh”, but also more aggressive, which is not a quality audiophiles are looking for.The 432 EVO offer you the possibility to convert your existing music on the fly into the better sounding 432 Hz, without any resolution loss. Several best of show awards we have won are the ultimate proof, and recent research by Maria Renold and a group of 2000 people showed that 90% preferred 432 Hz.For purists we still offer bit perfect mode on par with the best CD transports, or upsample only mode for those who want to tune the sound. All these modes are live switchable.

Dual SBooster External Power Supplies

The importance of a pure and clean power supply for digital audio cannot be stressed enough. Digital audio’s enemy is noise, and much of that comes from poorly designed power supplies or cheap SMPS (switched mode power supplies). In fact a dirty power supply can not only ruin the sonic performance of a server, it can also inject noise down the mains to infect the rest of your system!We thus take the specifications of our power supplies extremely seriously. The High-End has a true double independent power supply. Instead of offering several of dependent DC rails from one transformer, each of the bundled power supplies with the High-End has a separate AC filter, torodial transformer and dual stage DC buffering.The second part of the DC buffer is attached to each power supply, leading to a very short current paths towards the dedicated USB output board and of just a few centimeters. The “IT” parts inside the server also have their own dedicated power supply, with DC filtering between storage and main board, acting as a noise firewall for the moving parts inside HDD’s, or the PWM converters in SSD’s. As we use 2.5 inch drives, the electrical & mechanical noise is already drastically lower compared to normal consumer drives.Using a dual design with 2 external transformers leads to much faster transients compared to a single shared transformer. Both power supplies are also free of any transformer noise.

Full specification can be seen on the 432 EVO website.