Pink Faun 2.16x music streamer

My, how we’ve grown! The experience that convinced me of the inevitability of streaming was in 2010 with the tiny, tidy Logitech Squeezebox Touch that, despite being discontinued and disowned by its manufacturer, still has a cult-like following. Since then, we have seen an explosion of devices for file playback from local or nonlocal storage and web streams. They have varied widely in size and price and wildly in their range of capabilities, from do-it-all feature sets with all system audio functions (save speakers) in one box, like the NAD M33, to daisy-chained, specialized components that accomplish the same things (server –> streamer –> network appliance –> DAC –> preamp –> etc.). You can add to that the burgeoning array of potential add-ons to filter and/or convert the links between these components.

Well, the Pink Faun 2.16x is just a streamer. It lacks storage for music files—that’s optional—and it has no built-in DAC, but it’s an all-out effort, the streamer equivalent of multichassis stereo preamps and monster monoblock power amps that weigh hundreds of pounds. Its huge size and weight and Lamborghini Orange front panel (it is also available in black and other colors) shout that out loud.

The Pink Faun arrives in a substantial wooden crate that cradles the streamer in several inches of dense plastic; the weight of the crate and the other packing materials nearly equals the weight of the streamer. It took help and planning to lift it to the top of my rack. As my reward, I removed the top plate to satisfy my curiosity about why a streamer would need to be so massive to accomplish a straightforward, narrowly defined task.

What I saw was a computer motherboard with its CPU liquid-cooled by copper tubes coupling it to the large heatsinks that form the right side of the chassis. The symmetric heatsinks on the left serve to dissipate the heat from at least five large power transistors, part of the multiple power supplies in the Pink Faun. Both of those heatsinks are mounted to chassis side panels more than a half-inch thick. Behind the front panel, mounted to a similarly thick transverse subpanel, are three massive toroidal power transformers that would not be out of place in 250W power amps. There are separate linear supplies for the processor, motherboard, SSDs, clocks, and digital output cards, reflecting the designer’s obsessive concern for supplying each of the computer’s multiple functional components with an independent, low-noise power source.

The other concern targeted by the designer is the integrity of the data signals inside the Pink Faun. This was achieved by replacing the standard clocks supplied with this off-the-rack motherboard with PF’s proprietary, sealed, Oven Controlled Crystal (Xtal) Oscillators (OCXOs for short), available in standard or Ultra versions. The advantage of an OCXO is that the crystal oscillator is maintained at a fixed temperature so that its oscillation frequency is much more tightly controlled than it is with standard oscillators. Ultra OCXOs, each operating at a frequency specific to its task, are used for the system clock, the motherboard, and in each of the I/O cards, called bridges by PF. The 2.16x Pink Faun under test was supplied with an S/PDIF Bridge that has TosLink, coax, and AES/EBU connectors and a second bridge supporting USB. The heavy lifting is done with an AMD CPU (8 cores), 32GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD (footnote 1), running a custom Linux ultralow-latency real-time kernel operating system. On top of that runs Roon Server (subscription cost not included). The 2.16x is passively liquid-cooled, with no moving parts. In operation, its top plate and heatsinks were barely warm to the touch.

All one needs to do to get it going is to connect it to a network and turn it on. The Pink Faun runs headless—no monitor or display. It can be found and controlled from any device that runs Roon Remote including PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

Everything was quite familiar. I logged in to my Roon account with my laptop, chose the Pink Faun as Roon Core, pointed Roon to my music directories on my NAS and, after it digested the contents, had my library on-screen. I also linked Roon to my Qobuz account.

I would have liked to connect my exaSound e38 v2 DAC to the Pink Faun by USB, but that was not possible, because exaSound does not support or supply drivers for Linux, the operating system of the Pink Faun. Fortuitously, I had just received a new multichannel DAC, the Okto dac8 PRO, which works on Linux (or Mac) without special drivers. Roon recognized the dac8 PRO immediately.

Since the dac8 PRO was new to me, I also installed a Mytek Brooklyn DAC, which also requires no Linux drivers for USB. I also connected it to the Pink Faun’s AES/EBU and S/PDIF outputs; again, no drivers required.

I still wanted to hear the Pink Faun via the exaSound, so I added to the network exaSound’s Sigma Streamer, which functions as what Roon used to call a Roon Endpoint. (Roon now calls them “Outputs.”) I then connected the Sigma Streamer to the e38 via USB.

There was a striking dichotomy between the massive presence of the Pink Faun, with its rowdy Lambo Orange front panel, and its absolute dead silence in operation. By dead, I mean both the complete absence of sound from the physical unit itself and the vanishingly low noise from any of the output devices connected to it. To appreciate it, I removed my Audio Research MP1 preamp from the system and connected the DACs directly to my power amps. (All three DACs have volume controls.) None of the three DACs had any difficulty driving the power amps and, via balanced connections, they achieved normal active listening levels with plenty of headroom at attenuation settings around –20dB.

Intellectually, I am convinced that streamers like the Pink Faun are merely data processors—not audio processors. As such, they should not affect sound quality, for better or worse, assuming that they do not add (digital) noise and that their processing power is sufficient. The Pink Faun seemed to be completely up to the task.

My main job, though, as a Stereophile reviewer, is to listen and describe what I hear.

Listening
At random, I selected Marc-André Hamelin’s new Liszt & Thalberg: Opera transcriptions & fantasies (16/44.1 download, Hyperion CDA68320). This is a demo-quality record in more than one way: The performances, particularly of Liszt’s Hexaméron (“Morceau de concert ‘Grandes Variations de Bravoure sur la Marche des Puritains de Bellini'”), are demonstrations of Hamelin’s prodigious skill. It is also an excellent, fairly close and powerful presentation of a large Steinway piano.

Footnote 1: An additional 500GB SSD was installed to enable me to boot the Pink Faun into Windows in order to determine whether any sonic or performance issues were specifically Linux-related. They were not and the PF functioned well under Win10. That, however, is not its intended operation mode and I did prefer it in its normal mode.

NEXT: Page 2 »

Pink Faun High-End Audio

US distributor: Believe High Fidelity

1307 Samson Dr.

Hutto, TX 78634

(512) 470-2709

ibelieveinhifi.com

Page 1
Page 2
Specifications
Associated Equipment

Click Here: manly sea eagles team jersey