Just last week I was breaking the news to my wife that I needed to drill a hole in the wall between my office and our living room. You see, my main computer with all the gigabytes of music files I've collected is in the former, but the best speakers in the house are in the other room. Even after breaking through the wall, I told her, I would still have to run a cable up and over a door frame to get it to the receiver. She didn't look too happy; nor did she green-light my wire.
I've looked at wireless means of getting my digital files to the stereo, but frankly, none of them offered sufficient quality, particularly with classical music. Further, I really like controlling my audio collection with MediaMonkey, and wasn't ready to trade it for a less powerful package such as Sonos.
Remarkably, at just this moment of marital dissonance, Mass Fidelity delivered its first product to me for review: the Relay, an audiophile-quality Bluetooth receiver that promised to deliver CD quality sound wirelessly from one room to the next.
They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but the Relay makes a great first impression, and they say those do count! It is milled out of a hefty block of aluminum, and looks like something that might have come from the designers at Apple. In fact, at 4.6” x 4” x 1.4”, it is just a bit bigger than an Apple TV, but much more substantial. The matte exterior is only broken up by two RCA Jacks (which do double duty as analogue and digital ports), a power jack, a small antenna, an LED, and a power button. The device comes with cables for plugging it into RCA or mini connectors.
The Relay makes high claims: excellent quality (10Hz-20kHz +/- 0.02dB) and low signal to noise ration (112dB), but could it really deliver (as the Mass Fidelity website states) CD quality sound over the typically less-than-stellar Bluetooth spec? Mass Fidelity says that Bluetooth’s A2DP-profile can sustain 1.5Mbps
constant RF input and allow bursts of up to 3Mbps; more than enough data, they claim, to stream uncompressed better-than-CD-quality audio.
Why use Bluetooth instead of WiFi? For one thing, it means you don't need a special app to make it work; any Bluetooth device needs nothing more than to be turned on to connect. Another apparent benefit: the connection seems less subject to audio corruption than other wireless signals I've tested; seemingly unpreturbed by microwave, cell, or wireless use nearby. Also, by using some of the latest Bluetooth enhancements it is easy to connect to different devices that come up in real-world scenarios. While it can only actively connect to a single device at a time, switching between devices is easy. Just turn off the Bluetooth on the active device and the Relay will be ready to connect to another, and if it is one that has previously paired to it, it will set up the connection automatically, they call this TurboPairing. The Relay can remember up to six devices, more than enough for most families.
The Relay can feed two digital streams at the same time. For example you can feed one digital output to a surround receiver or your system’s primary DAC and the other to a headphone amp/DAC combo unit. In my tests I used the excellent on-board 24 Bit Burr-Brown DAC to feed the analogue inputs on my Denon receiver.
Setting up Relay is about as simple as plugging it into the analog or digital inputs of your preamp and to the power. There's only one switch, the power button. It can also be used to switch between analog and digital output, and also set whether the unit will power off after 30 minutes. Changing modes is as easy as pressing and holding the button.
Once connected to your receiver, the next step is telling your Bluetooth device, such as your iPad or Android phone, to broadcast to the Relay. This is the same procedure as hooking your device up to a wireless headset or portable speaker; actually, it is even easier as merely turning on the Relay puts it into pairing mode.
The bottom line is that, regardless of source, my digital music is available in impeccable quality to my sound system. And, the Relay is not limited to digital files, you can also use it to stream digital services like Spotify directly as well at a quality level you've probably never experienced before. Now, you may say that you've had this all along by plugging your phone into your receiver with a wire. Leaving aside the great benefit of cutting the cable, the Relay is about more than going wireless: The sound quality of its DAC is probably better than the output stage of your headphone jack.
The first test I ran was listening to music from my iPad on my sound system. I was very pleasantly surprised by the sound. It is one thing to put out sound to a pair of earbuds, and another to produce quality music, wirelessly to my stereo. One of the sad facts of audio life is that a good system can reveal the problems in source material, so I thought the flaws in the tracks would be amplified (literally) and made worse through the wireless transmission. I'm not going to say that the iTunes cuts equaled my CD recordings, but most of the pop, rock, and folk tracks sounded very good, indeed! Classical music is always a challenge for compression algorithms, and even the Relay couldn't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, still many of tracks were listenable - the fault was clearly in the source, not the device.
To get a true sense of what the Relay could produce I needed to connect it to my computer with its ample collection of uncompressed flac audio files. This proved a bit more trying than getting the mobile devices to work. Though my system has Bluetooth, and even had the drivers installed and working (with my Bluetooth mouse), at first I couldn't get the computer to recognize the Relay. Thinking it might be a distance problem (though, like most Bluetooth devices, the Relay claims it can connect within 30 feet of the sound source) I tried moving the iPad to my office. It effortlessly made the connection to the Relay, so I turned to the next most obvious source of the problem: bad drivers.
A quick Google for "Broadcom Bluetooth Drivers" quickly had me downloading and installing the latest. After rebooting the computer to get the drivers loaded I had to go into Control Panel and "add a Bluetooth device". Now I could see and select the Relay! Finally, (under Control Panel->Sound) I had to select the Relay as the default device. Unfortunately, Windows 7 doesn't seem to give the option to rename devices as it does to printers, so the Relay shows up, somewhat confusingly, as "Headphones, Bluetooth Hands-free Audio). If I want to listen to music at my desktop via headsets or my desktop speakers I need to reselect my computer's audio card instead.
I tested files ripped from CDs in lossless Flac and lossless WMA formats. Liberated from my computer speakers, these files took on a new life, fulfilling the expectations from when I created them years ago. I was not able to discern an appreciable difference between the source disks and the files beamed through the Relay. More important to me than simple A/B testing, however, was the musicality of the audio. I listened to hours and hours on the Relay and found none of the fatigue that often accompanies lower-fidelity compressed audio. In fact, I couldn't really tell the difference between my CDs and lossless tracks played back through the Relay. Chalk this up to excellent engineering and high-quality components.
I'm not an engineer, but the explanation from Mass Fidelity is as follows: "A dedicated Cirrus Logic processor takes the Bluetooth 2.1EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) signal and converts it into a high definition 24bit/48kHz stream that directly feeds the digital outputs or the analog stage. The 24bit/48kHz digital signal is fed into a low noise, audiophile-grade Burr Brown DAC that decodes it into a low noise, dynamic 2V analog output. Custom proprietary code synchronizes the three chips’ digital clocks to ensure against timing errors for pristine sound quality without dropouts and digital artefacts. The firmware also controls all pairing functions and the relay that switches between digital and analog output modes."
At $250, this gadget was right up there in price with Monster Cable. However, unlike jacked up wire prices, the costs here are more than justified by the convenience of going wireless and the high-quality: No holes in the wall, no cables, great sound.
