Intro
Contents
Anyone who steps into the world of high-end streaming audio is overwhelmed with all kinds of tweaks. Cables, filters, power supplies, switches … it can get really complex. Now it is perfectly possible to start ‘small’. But again, the sky is the limit. We look at Silent Angel’s top notch products: the Bonn NX (3499 Euro), Forester FX (3299 Euro) and Genesis GX (3299 Euro). A “stack” of just over 10,000 Euro.
We are not going to bore you here with a whole story about why a switch has an audible impact on playback. We’ve done that before. If you are interested in our research in this area, you can read a complete, summary article about it here and see below the brief presentation we made at Bender, in collaboration with Dimex (this is in Dutch, but you can auto-translate the subs).
The trio
Silent Angel has come out early with an “audiophile” switch (bit of a strange way of labeling a switch, but anyway…). The Silent Angel Bonn N8 is an 8-port switch optimized for audio systems. Not that it transmits data better, but the noise level is simply lower. And that is audible. They have thus – in our opinion – made the market for this type of product.
Lowering this noise level can be done in numerous ways: better isolation of the ports by applying better galvanic isolators, for example. However, it can also be done with better, cleaner power supplies. Or a better optimized pcb layout with better components that emit less noise.
The Silent Angel Bonn NX is the best that Silent Angel can make right now. Again, this is an 8-port switch, but now the isolation of – and between – the ports has been further improved, the noise level of the entire switch has been lowered even further with a nice, internal, linear power supply (and extra isolation), and the build quality is, of course, a bit nicer. These include a double-walled, aluminum housing, insulating feet and a sleek logo that Silent Angel milled into the housing. It all just looks very nice.
Would you like to optimize even further? That is also possible: there is a Forester FX external power supply and a Genesis GX external clock. These Silent Angel supplies in the same housing, so you can place it as a nice stack in the cabinet.
Now we will talk later about the audible impact of this trio. However, we can already reveal that the biggest step is the Silent Angel Bonn NX itself. And thankfully so: it wouldn’t be quite right if it didn’t really work until you had to purchase this trio completely. However, every “tweak” is audible and noticeable.