The Audiophile Voice reviews Qsonix Q105
Contents
1. difficult to use in that it took a lot of pressure to drag and drop an album into the playlist space needed to use more than one fingertip Yet the drop down menus and their subsets of items to click on worked much more easily Calibrating the touch screen which is an easy procedure ee el Am Mocha Min NEA ay aE Dari Foul Qasr Kii aiii A Givin Murs Cison ae oan Ja Dan Mar nit fence ao ee iets a Pile I P a eal FRR ex Deagssay JROMNOPO RS Tarppey yr ge tals didn t help this am sure that units shipped to customers are better in this regard found the open close button on the CD transport to be kind of hard to work especially when the drawer was out and couldn t see the button Aside from these fairly small items the system worked flawlessly Horizontal Ad Volume 13 Issue 6 In conclusion really enjoyed my time with the Qsonix Q105 and it was a good addition to my other sources of music It is a well thought out and implemented sys tem and due to its more affordable price the Q105 will likely find its way into many more music lover s systems 002. amp Device name specifies the friendly name of your 100 which wil be used to identity this device on your network Import Media Show Cursor Lise the heip button next to each button bo eet detailed help for each system funtion P Backup System Restore System f Y _ RESTART SYSTEM SHUTDOWN SYSTEM Year Search Tapestry All Recent and Imported An image of the touch screen with the View Mode Menu set for Cover is shown in Fig 2 The other View Modes come up with a list of the appropriate sort variable Clicking within these lists then displays the album cov ers two at a time within the browser area At the right end of this menu bar is an icon for tools This gets into a whole range of system variables with two tiers of tabbed pages The upper tabbed section has the headings System Network CD Playback iPod and Information Each of these main tab headings has sub tab headings with appropriate things to control An example of the system tab is shown in Fig 3 First off started exploring some of the music on the machine Not yet being familiar with the many facets of the interface my method was to randomly sample cuts from albums of interest by putting them in a playlist and then playing them If was fond of a particular playlist it could be easily named and saved found that liked quite a lot of music on the Q105 and saved a number of playlists At one point early in the process of learning and u
3. did listen to the analog outputs and found them to be very good but not quite as good as using the external DACs In addition there were some popping sounds when changing volume on my Wyred4Sound STP SE preamp when the Q105 was first turned on suggesting some d c offset in the analog out puts but this slowly went away after some five minutes or so of operation At one point later into using the Q105 and writing up the review and just after putting some more of my CDs into the system in particular BHK Faves 1 one of my favorite compilations played some of these tracks back through the Q105 directly into the PWD Then played the original CD on my UDP 1 into my Genesis Technologies Digital Lens and into the PWD Here the sound was better and more defined as is usual going through the Digital Lens Putting the feed out of the Q105 into the Digital Lens brought things toward being more nearly identical In my long term experi ence the Digital Lens always does this for a digital sig nal feed Going to my ModWright modified Sony NS9100ES player was again reminded why this is my reference CD player Sound was noticeably more detailed relaxed and present playing the same CDs Still in the final analysis at the end of the review period was lis tening to several albums on the Q105 directly into the PWT and using my SF tube power amp and the DTG module preamp and must say that the sound from this set up was very very good a
4. 00 Osonic 9105 Music Management System Tea Rc Cia vesaat w e lene wal A l Tieri Bhar Coder im s A 1 UET a ii at ier Finli Fala 5 7 i al rye CAI OUTE Gi ELMO PO AS TA W T a N Bascom H King Sna HAD HEARD quite a few interesting things about the Qsonix and other music systems and being professionally involved in some of the various ways to play digital music that have evolved recently I had some considerable interest when I was offered a chance to review a Qsonix Q105 system The Q105 is the newest and most affordable music server from Qsonix and is basically a simplified version of the Qsonix Q110 machine that has been both widely and favorably reviewed To make the Q105 more affordable and attractive to a wider range of music lovers some of the features of the Q110 have been left out Chief among these is the advanced RS232 TCPIP communication protocol for multi room or whole house automation a feature where integration with third party control or automation systems is desired or required Other simplification steps eliminated the capability of hard wired IR integration and the reduction of the num ber of discrete audio outputs from four to two However the Q105 has the same extensive software feature set as the Q110 The SP DIF digital output used with an external DAC makes the Q105 an especially desirable setup for playing one s music with high quali ty sonic results Of course the syst
5. aso Thu Seata and Fade wre the Wosia A nine naait Ammen screen a menu bar is at the top an album browser con trol at the bottom with the majority of the remaining area devoted to the album browser display The right hand third of the screen is divided vertically from top to bottom into a display of playlists the currently loaded playlist and at the bottom the playback controls The general idea in using the Q105 is to select albums or tracks of albums in the album browser display area and drag and drop them over into the playlist area Being a touch screen this dragging and dropping is done with one s fingertips on the screen See Fig 1 Probably the most operationally important item in the top menu bar is the View Mode Menu button at the top left This gives a menu of the various ways to view the music files on the Q105 These include Album Artist Genre Cover Fig 2 Here the Touch Screen s View Mode Menu has been set to display album covers Anyi Workout Tats sag What ft Classis Rari THs i linn hary Herbamen aij teen tnr Inienieg her be bet ae G airs Perinat EHE ot A A i y m be i 3 Tauns the Leng Fallen lirest iz T Lovesreciar A Crow iton Ae wet pete Volume 13 Issue 6 00 00 aformation 0100 Music System Change ey system sal atieiwibka y tings ata i other tabs avalible in this are Bein Maintenance Tallbrate Touchscreen
6. em s two sets of ana log outputs work well too and allow separate music outputs with separate playlists to go to two systems in one s home When it came time to get the equipment Mike Weaver President of Qsonix drove up from the home of Qsonix in Westlake CA up to Santa Barbara CA where I live After meeting each other and bringing in two boxes of the Qsonix equipment one for the touch screen monitor and the other for the server itself we discussed the various ways to connect it all up had the idea that wanted the touch screen controller to sit on a small table right to the right of my listening chair the audiophile voice Where to put the server was more open to options decided to place it on the side of my listening room where my system preamp and other gear reside This made it just about perfect for the length of cable Weaver brought along to connect the server to the touch screen a distance was about 12 feet and the cable was 15 feet long DUTPUTT II OUTPUT oN oe to RO em Modeloios BEJ gqeonix of the Q105 can be found on the Qsonix web site www qsonix com Click on the download item at the bottom of their home page for a list of very informative items including the user manual for the Q105 Q110 machines The touch screen is divided into six main areas At the left and covering approximately two thirds of the I really enjoyed using the Qsonix Q105 It offers a simple reliable and y
7. et ultra sophisticated way to store manage and listen to high quality sound files The machine Mike brought for review had been most recently at the 2009 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest and had a lot of music material loaded on its 500 GB hard drive decided on a long 25 foot Ethernet cable that had to connect the server on the music system side of my listening room over to the other office side and into my Ethernet router With the Q105 up and running Mike quickly walked me through some of the funda mentals of operating the system and spent some time telling me about the way the server gets the CD album information from the Internet He mentioned that their operating system software is quite a bit more sophisti cated than most of the other music systems After return ing from lunch got a few more pointers and after Mike left was on my own A user interface such as that of the Q105 is quite sophisticated and extensive will explain a few of the more salient features as describe my experience in learning and using it More complete information of the features and operation Fig 1 The initial entry or operating window of the Q105 is the Touch Screen Ban Bacharach Greatest Hata Femi Fem nes ir UL e ot ww Mae Mee n Alpu UO Cnty nir p l GOVET lt Year t Soarrth P and r a aldida TLE Te yee te eben ae 1 Reg lamy Al bl aNCORE a g x A 7 4 Recent z iw s F
8. nd enjoyable can see how a system like the Q105 could be quite compelling for a certain group of people who would like all their music available with a great interface like the Q105 has Personally for me being more of an engineer designer experimenter and reviewer of high end audio equipment it wouldn t suit me as a sole source of my music as play music from numerous sources like computer iTouch and the disc players would say that loading a large collection of CDs into a system like the Q105 would be quite time consuming for most key system settings the audiophile voice although understand that there are for hire services that will do this for moderate fees In addition to directly ripping CDs the Qsonix systems presently accept importation of MP3 FLAC and WMA music files Having a number of FLAC files from various sources and resolutions attempted to load some of them into the Q105 both from a thumb drive into the USB input and as a network source on my network Try as might wasn t able to make this work got lots of support about this from Qsonix along with strong assurances that thousands of cus tomers do this routinely think not making this work as due to my own inability to sufficiently understand Windows networking and my own failure to do that last small thing needed to succeed have a few nits to pick on my experience with the Q105 The par ticular touch screen was variously
9. sing the Q105 I had ripped some CDs into the machine and put them all in a genre that defined as BHK 0 so that could easily and rapidly identify those had put in the machine My idea was enjoy some of Fig 3 What the window for my favorite the system tab looks like when music but also to opened Located here are controls compare the sound of these albums or tracks via the Q105 to the sound of the same tracks played from my reference optical disc playing machines was also interested in the idea of controlling the Q105 from my computer while worked Mike Weaver had showed me two neat web applications that put on my Vista laptop computer to do this One was a Microsoft Internet Explorer application that showed the View mode choices as tabs along the top with album and playlist information below The other was an Apple iPhone iTouch image that looked like what one would see with an actual iPhone iTouch device controlling the Q105 These web apps would allow me to control the Q105 away from the touch screen while working over in my office side of the listening room Since had wanted an Apple iTouch for some time got one to try on the Q105 among many other things It worked well and could control the Q105 via my wireless network from wherever happened to be in my house Way Cool spent most of my listening time using the SP DIF digital output going into either a PS Audio DLIII or the new PS Audio PWD
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