Стримеры — Electrocompaniet ECM 1 MKII

The ECM 1 MKII combines a streaming player and a DAC in one chassis from Electrocompaniet of Norway, part of the Classic Line of the brand. It uses the same app and interface as the EC Living wireless range, so one control screen covers both the hi-fi rack and multi-room speakers in other rooms. In the current catalogue it sits alongside the EMC 1 MKV CD players as the streaming source.

Key specs that matter

Conversion runs at 192 kHz and 24 bit through two Cirrus Logic DAC chips, and incoming material is also upsampled to 192 kHz and 24 bit. Supported file types include WAV, MP3, AAC+, Vorbis, ALAC, FLAC, APE, AIFF and WMA up to 192 kHz and 24 bit, plus DSD up to DSD128 at 5.6 MHz. The noise floor across 20 Hz to 20 kHz is below -145 dB, frequency response spans 0.5 Hz to 48 kHz and THD+N stays under 0.0005 %. Output impedance is 300 ohm on the analogue outputs, and the player is a two-channel design. For external sources there are four S/PDIF inputs, two on coaxial and two on optical TOSLink, each accepting 192 kHz and 24 bit. The chassis is 470 mm wide, 381 mm deep and 80 mm high, and weighs 8.3 kg without a drive installed. Power use is 50 W in operation and 0.5 W in standby.

Engineering and use context

Network access is by wired LAN or Wi-Fi, so the player can sit in a rack with no Ethernet socket nearby. Built-in services cover Tidal Connect, Spotify Connect and Qobuz, and the player also accepts AirPlay 2, DLNA, internet radio and Bluetooth, is Roon Ready and holds JPLAY certification. A docking bay on the unit takes a 3.5 or 2.5 inch internal drive that the owner can install, turning the player into a music library with no fixed capacity limit. The analogue output stage is symmetrical. Because the four digital inputs run through the same converter, a CD transport, TV or games console can use the ECM 1 MKII as its DAC, and the multi-room software lets it play the same music as EC Living speakers elsewhere in the home.

Pairing

The analogue output can feed a line preamplifier such as the EC 5 from the same factory, or an integrated amplifier with XLR or RCA inputs. The coaxial digital output of the EMC 1 MKV CD player can connect to one of the S/PDIF inputs so that disc playback also uses the Cirrus Logic converters.

Alternatives

The ECM 2 is an earlier Electrocompaniet network media player with an internal DAC, offering four USB sockets and decoding of DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD.