I took delivery of a Rose RS201E network player earlier today. It’s been warming up playing various music for the last few hours. Here are some of the radio channels being set up;
I currently have the RS201E playing directly into a pair of Quad ESL63s using the onboard amplification, and it does sound pretty good, and will hopefully sound even better after a couple of days warming up. I listened to the first act of Philip Glass’ Akhnaten - the deep brass and drums were impressive, and had the subtlety and nuance of genuinely well-defined bass - phew! The mid & treble probably need a little more warming up time before I comment in detail. The RS201E is replacing a Naim DAC and power amp, and I will try the pre-amp out into the Naim power amp to see if this has any significant effect on the sound.
The Rose app seems to work well and to offer the normal kind of functionality you would expect. I have plugged in a portable Samsung SSD with about 400GB of music, and am still trying to work out what metadata is working, and what is not. I can see and play all of the music by navigating the file folder structure, but searches by composer and artist are not currently producing exactly the expected results. (I’ve spent a considerable amount of time creating the metadata for these files, to make sure it is consistent and accurate).
So far so good!
