Rapallo | Altair G2.1 Digital Audio Streamer

EQUIPMENT REVIEW
AURALiC ALTAIR G2.1
generally to be a strong point of this component. Because
distortion in the bass is less obvious than higher up the
range you can tolerate lower quality in this department so
long as it has depth and weight. But when a streamer has
really clean and extended bass you know all about it and
this AURALiC certainly does, the low end on numerous
albums came through with clarity and power, extending the
sense of depth in the image (which as we know is directly
related to bass) and rendering the low notes on all manner
of instruments with ease and precision.
This is related to the quietness of background that
AURALiC’s efforts to keep out EMI have achieved, the
perceived noise oor is very low indeed and this makes
room for the quieter notes and allows them to decay in a
very natural fashion. Dan Berkson’s Dialogues works a treat
on the ALTAIR, sounding very solid and three dimensional in
the room with a ‘live in the studio’ energy. This band proves
that individual players do not need to be well acquainted
so long as they have good direction and know their chops,
and the musicians that Berkson gathered for this set clearly
do. It’s tight and the acoustic instruments have full rich tone,
even the non acoustic Rhodes keyboard makes the grade
here too. I was impressed at the way the ALTAIR manages
to deliver a tonal balance that reects this recording so well
without recourse to valves in its output. It’s not soft or sweet
but neither does it emphasise leading edges for the sake of
immediacy.
The majority of my listening was done with the ALTAIR
connected to a preamp with its output xed. I did try going
direct to the power amplier on a couple of occasions but
there was a loss of dynamics that discouraged this. It could
be that my Moor Amps Angel 6 power amplier is a bad t
in electrical terms and passive preamps tend to be more
fussy in this regard. I used two different preamps and both
single-ended and balanced outputs on the ALTAIR and
preferred the external preamp every time.
One thing I noticed about this streamer was how well it
worked when I wasn’t paying attention; some sources can
be distracting (in a bad way) when they’re in the background
and others just plain dull but this one worked really well.
Isuspect that this is also related to the low noise and wide
dynamic range, which allows it to sound almost as good
when it’s quiet as it does at more engaging levels. I tried
the latter with Patti Smith’s Gone Again where the song
‘Beneath the Southern Cross’ is powerful and evocative
thanks to the depth of feeling in the voice, but it’s the
that it doesn’t emit any electrical noise into the system.
You can change volume with the front panel knob or by
remote control, the catch is that AURALiC don’t supply the
handset. Instead you can program the ALTAIR to accept
a wide range of commands using the smart IR learning
system that’s accessed via the display. This required
excellent eyesight to read but does allow all manner of
features to be accessed from your choice of handset.
Smooth operator
A lot more features are available within the Lightning
DS control app, these include the parametric equaliser,
resampling conguration which allows specic source
sample rates to be raised to a desired level, lter settings
where four options are available (I went with ‘smooth’,
obviously), speaker placement options to compensate for
practical rather than sound quality set ups, and a home
theatre bypass option for the line input. The various Wi-Fi
inputs can be switched on and off and Roon and Tidal
Connect modes likewise enabled.
It wasn’t until I had been using the ALTAIR G2.1 for some
time that AURALiC mentioned that the balanced output has
a lot more going for it than the single ended so a lot of my
notes refer to that connection, and to be honest it made a
pretty good st of things not least in the bass which seems
One thing I noticed about this streamer was how well
it worked when I wasn’t paying attention.
Reproduced from hi-fi+ Issue 208 hifiplus.com