Ross A’hern merges professional and recreational listening
Published: ASIA
AUSTRALIA: Ross A’hern is an Australian sound engineer whose career has included stints in senior operational and management positions at Sony Music Studios, the Sydney Opera House and ABC. He later went on to establish his own production company, building it around Merging Technologies’ Pyramix DAW and adding the Horus and Hapi networked I/O converter systems when they were released. Confident in his experience using the Swiss manufacturer’s products, Mr A’hern recently added the Merging+Nadac player to his line-up.
‘I have keenly pursued the recording of music in high resolution and surround for several years now because of the dramatic improvement I hear in the outcomes compared to standard resolution stereo,’ Mr A’hern said. ‘However, even though I had a suitable high quality playback system in my studio, this pursuit raised several issues that required solving.
‘For some time, I had been hoping for the day when I could combine the studio and domestic - production and library playback – aspects of music through the same, integrated, high quality system, and the Nadac is the final component that has allowed me to do this,’ he furthered. ‘The result is the ability to bring these two different but interdependent worlds together, which makes perfect sense to me, as from a listening point of view, the aims of the passionate music listener and the sound engineer are essentially the same.’
The player allows Mr A’hern to keep his entire music library readily available for use in on place. It also enables him to verify that files play back as expected in the real world and to distribute his work via mircreation.com.
‘As a network based, multi-channel DAC capable of working at all resolutions up to DXD and multiple DSD, the Nadac can sit on the same Ravenna network as my studio system and my media library, comprising Roon as a play-out program and a NAS for storing content, including high resolution audio files,’ noted Mr A’hern. ‘The newly developed Nadac player is a standalone unit capable of running Roon and removing the computer from the network altogether. All that is required is a Nadac player and an NAS to make an amazing media library system. Either Nadac version can directly drive an amplifier or active speakers, thereby removing another variable component in the listening chain.’