manual

MARANTZ GUIDE TO PC-AUDIO | NA-11S1 | 05.2013 | 2www.marantz.eu
The NA-11S1 has been designed to give you access to a wide
range of music from a variety of different sources such as:
• Internet Radio via your internet connection.
• all your music stored on a PC / Mac or NAS (network attached
storage) drive through to your home computer network.
• (stream) your music stored on an iDevice or in an iTunes library
by using AirPlay.
• fi les stored on a Smartphone, USB stick or a Portable
Hard Drive via the front USB-A connection.
• fi les stored on your computer by a direct connection of the
PC / Mac via the rear USB-B connection.
In this document we will mainly focus on the last option on the list,
the USB-B connectivity as this is the recommended way for music
lovers to enjoy their music in the best quality possible. The player
acts as a DAC – Digital to Analogue Converter (in fact it replaces
the soundcard of your PC / MAC) and directly converts the digital
music signal to analogue domain to hand it over to the amplifi er.
But fi rst let’s dig a bit more into the different ways of accessing
music to get a better understanding and clarify some terminology.
When you fi nish the document you will have all the information you
need to get the best audio performance from your PC-Audio and,
specifi cally, from the NA-11S1.
DIGITAL CONNECTIONS
LAN-Local Area Network
Let’s start off with the LAN connection and it possibilities. You most
probably are already familiar with it so we will just touch on it.
The LAN connection gives you access to the internet via the router
and to all the PC, Mac or NAS-Drives located in your network. You
can directly access more than 10,000 internet radio stations and
Podcasts, and stream music stored on your PC / Mac and also from a
NAS drive. All your downloaded or locally ripped music is accessible.
It is also important to know that there is some limitation to the fi le
formats. It is most common that the following fi les can be handled by
network players: MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC, FLAC and by better players
the high resolution ALAC, FLAC HD and also WAV fi les.
In addition you will have direct access to internet streaming services
such as Spotify and last.fm, and you can use AirPlay to stream music
from an iDevice or iTunes. Android smartphones will use the DLNA
capability here.
Other digital inputs
As you will discover, there are two different USB ports on the
NA-11S1. The fi rst of these (USB-A) is conveniently placed on the
front so you can plug in a USB key, a Smartphone or a portable
HDD. This is a synchronous connection and is the simplest method
of implementing USB audio from portable devices.
This is a USB-A port.
The Second USB-B port on the rear panels is for connecting a
PC or Mac directly, and supports not only PCM signals up to 192
kHz/24bits, but also DSD 2.8MHz and 5.6 MHz for maximised
versatility. This counts for the NA-11S1. Other USB-DAC’s might
not support all resolutions. Additionally, for the NA-11S1 a newly
developed Ground/Signal isolator technology helps to reduce PC
noise for the highest quality sound.
This is a USB-B port.
Using this connection will bypass your PC audio board (soundcard)
to directly access the high quality DAC of the external player. There
are other technologies to it, such as “asynchronous mode” and
“bit-transparent mode”, but this will be explained at a later stage
when we are going to explain how to use this connection and how
to get the best audio quality. Another big benefi t of this PC to DAC
connection is that there is no fi le limitation, as everything playing
on your PC / Mac media player will be reproduced by the NA-11S1,
as long as it is a stereo signal in PCM or DSD.
Just to complete the list of digital inputs we need to mention here
the optical and the coaxial digital connection. By these the NA-11S1
can be used as high end DAC as well for other devices with this
type of digital output, for example an Apple TV or other device, to
dramatically increase their audio performance. On the image below
you can see these inputs together with the USB-B input on the right.
White paper