 The digital music console by CI Audio can be looked at in two ways. A streamer based on a small board computer or a serious piece of audio gear that happens to use a small board computer. Let's see what's more appropriate. Channel Island's Audio has a program of electronics like Class D power amps, passive pre-amps, upgrade power supplies and a network player on review here. Let's first see how to use this player. It is to be connected to an integrated amplifier or power amplifier like the C100S of the same manufacturer I use in this example. That amplifier has to be connected to the DMC over a pair of RCA cables and to a pair of speakers over loudspeaker cables. The DMC needs also be connected to your network over either Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi so you can play internet radio stations and streaming services like Spotify, Tidal and Cobus. Music stored on your computer, NAS or USB drive can be played too. You control the DMC using an internet browser on your smartphone, tablet or computer. In this setup you even control volume this way. If you connect a USB optical drive, you can even play and rip CDs. If you need to connect more sources, you need an integrated amplifier. Now you set the DMC to fixed output and set the volume and input selection on the amplifier. The DMC has a sturdy, well-built aluminium housing that measures 215 x 145 x 73 mm without Wi-Fi antenna and weighs 3.6 kilos. The front only holds a blue power led. On the rear we find an ISC mains input with power switch. Four line outputs on RCA, two for positive polarity and two for negative polarity. For use with amplifiers with single-ended inputs, a single RCA per channel, you only use the positive or the negative outputs. If your amplifier has balanced inputs on XLR, you can order a special cable that uses all four RCA's on one side and has XLR's on the other. Further to the left there is a 5V DC output intended for a later this year to be introduced slot loading optical drive. This drive will have matching cosmetics and footprint to the DMC and can be used for playing and ripping. It uses reportedly a high precision slot loading drive mechanism in a heavily damped chassis. It connects to the DMC over asynchronous USB to one of the four USB-A connectors. A network connector and a Wi-Fi antenna socket complete the tool. This is where it really gets interesting. From the ISC mains input the power goes to the toroidal transformer that has two secondary windings, one 5V and one 8V. From there it goes to the power electronics where they are made to control direct current feeds. Two times plus 3.3V, plus 5V and plus or minus 8V. These are sent to the DAC board where we find two Crystek CCHD 757-25 ultra low phase noise oscillators having typically only 82 femtoseconds jitter. Close by we find the ASAE Casay AK4493 DAC chip, a very modern DAC chip that is relatively insensitive to jitter. It supports PCM up to 32-bit 768 kHz and DSD 256. You can set three reconstruction filters. Sharp roll-off, slow roll-off and super slow roll-off. In front of the DAC board we see a mean well switch mode power supply that is capable of delivering 6 amps at 5 volts. It feeds the small board computer. To show this let's go to the open side of the DMC. Here is the DAC board we saw from the top. Below it the ASUS Thinkerboard S small board computer. You might want to know why the Thinkerboard S is used instead of Raspberry Pi. Well, the Thinkerboard has the same dimensions, has the connectors at the same place and even the GPIO bus the general purpose input output that is used for the extension boards is compatible. But the processor is considerable faster. A quad-core ROCKCIP RK3288 running at 1.8 GHz. And it has double the RAM, 2 GB. And where the Pi offers 100 kbit Ethernet, the Thinkerboard can do gigabit Ethernet. More important is that the Ethernet port is not routed over the USB channel, a well-known limitation of the Pi. The way the operation system is stored differs too. The Thinkerboard has onboard 16 GB EMMC storage that is faster and more robust than microSD. But if you would want to use a microSD, there is a slot for that too. Not that you need to for CI Audio delivers the unit ready to play. I can even imagine that CI Audio rather have you change nothing for it does require some knowledge and as said, there is no need. I have mainly used the DMC in combination with the matching C100S power amplifier for it forms a very nice combination. Not only aesthetically, but also sound wise. For control, just type CI Audio-DMC.local in the address bar of your browser. I'll give you a short tour of the user interface. We started the home screen. Music on a share or USB drive can be indexed and then you select artist, album, genre and so on as with any music player. Let's go for artist. Select LD Miola and open Consequences of Chaos. In the playback screen we can see details on the tracks, like in this case that we are playing a DSD track. In the middle we see the album name, track name and artist above the album art. Above that we play pause and skip buttons. On the right you see the volume settings. This can easily be changed by moving your finger on the circle or by pressing the speaker icons below it. The cue screen shows what is programmed to play. If we go back to home and select web radio, we can choose from thousands of internet radio stations worldwide, like for instance Japan. Next to this way of working, it also functions as a Bluetooth receiver, a UP&PAV renderer, Apple Airport renderer and CD player if you add a USB optical drive. It supports Spotify, Tidal and Cobus, but doesn't function as a rune endpoint. Plugins can't be added either. I suspect CI Audio didn't like to have support those plugins since they can be rather flaky. I started this program wondering if the DMC should be seen as a streamer based on a small-bod computer or a serious piece of audio gear that happens to use a small-bod computer. Sound wise it's certainly the last. This is a very well sounding piece of gear that sounds worthy of its money. It sounds clean, open, is very low on jitter and thus relaxed with good sibilance reproduction as is to be expected in this price category. Together with the matching power amp, the C100S, it forms a powerful combination that ends only just below my setup 1. Sound quality and simplicity, those are the words I would like to label the DMC1. Best of two worlds might be a good label as well since it combines the strength of Volumio on the Acer Small-bod computer with very good electronic design. The tech staff of CI Audio allegedly have a solid background in designing for high-end manufacturers and that's what you hear. A good example is the analog stage after the DAC that is powered with plus and minus 8 volts from a linear power supply. You usually don't see that on the headboard DACs. Not that those are bad, you can get good results with them, but not at this level. That's why there is a price difference. Even though I showed you what's inside, you might not understand the price difference. Just listen to the DMC without knowing what's inside and you will not doubt the €2000 it costs. CI Audio has a 30-day money-backed policy and a five-year warranty. There even is a European distributor, which brings us to the end of this video. There will be a new one next Friday at 5pm central European time. If you don't want to miss that, subscribe to this channel or follow me on the social media so you will be informed when new videos are out. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. Many thanks to those viewers that support this channel financially. It keeps me independent and thus trustworthy. If that makes you feel like supporting my work too, the links are in the comments below this video on YouTube. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.