Стримеры — QUAD Platina Stream

The Platina Stream is a network streamer with an onboard DAC in QUAD's Platina series, built in a rigid metal chassis with side-mounted heatsinks and an anodised fascia in black or silver. It pairs an ESS Sabre ES9038PRO eight-channel converter with Roon Ready certification and a linear power supply, and its combination of analogue and digital outputs means it can feed an amplifier directly or act as a network source for an outboard converter.

Key specs that matter

PCM playback runs from 44.1 kHz to 768 kHz at up to 32 bits, and DSD64 through DSD512 are handled natively. Balanced XLR and RCA analogue outputs deliver a variable 0 to 2.05 V rms through a 120 ohm output impedance, with frequency response of plus or minus 0.5 dB from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. QUAD quotes signal to noise above 116 dB on RCA and above 120 dB on XLR, and THD below 0.001% at 1 kHz and 2.05 V rms. Coaxial and optical digital outputs run at 500 mVpp plus or minus 50 mVpp into 75 ohms, capped at 24-bit/192 kHz. The chassis is 445 mm wide, 134.5 mm high and 348 mm deep, and it weighs 11.8 kg net.

Engineering and use context

Two precision master clocks drive the DAC to keep jitter low. A quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor running at 1.8 GHz per core looks after media indexing, album art caching and system control. The linear supply is built around a 50 VA toroidal transformer feeding the digital and analogue stages. Network access is through Gigabit Ethernet or dual-band 2.4/5 GHz Wi-Fi to 802.11ac. Streaming options cover Tidal Connect, TuneIn Radio, Qobuz Connect, Plex and Spotify Connect. USB storage formatted as FAT32, exFAT or NTFS can be played, with FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, DSF, DIFF, DoP and MP3 files accepted. A 4.3-inch 800 x 480 pixel colour IPS screen shows menus, playback data, VU meters and artwork, with a dimming option, and control comes from a front-panel encoder or the supplied remote. Standby consumption is under 0.5 W, and mains input is 220-240 V or 100-120 V.

Pairing

Set to variable level, the Platina Stream connects directly to a stereo power amp, while the fixed-level route suits the Platina integrated amplifier launched alongside it. A separate converter can instead take its signal from the coaxial or optical outputs.

Alternatives

The QUAD Artera Solus Play takes a different approach, adding hi-res streaming up to 24-bit/192 kHz over Wi-Fi or Ethernet to a CD player, DAC and amplifier in one Artera chassis.