John
On my office desk sits a most well-connected DAC — a book-sized slab of electronics with options for MQA, DSD, analogue or digital volume attenuation, Apple remote control hijack, single-ended or balanced outputs; on the rear panel for connection to an amplifier (like the Mytek Brooklyn Amp) and on the front for driving low- or high-impedance headphones. Heck, it even has an MM phono stage. That DAC is the Mytek Brooklyn Plus. US$2195. Review here.
If I want to stream digital audio to the Brooklyn Plus, I must call on a third party device for hook-up to one of the Plus DAC’s numerous digital inputs: USB (hello Sonore microRendu), coaxial (hello ALLO DigiOne), TOSLINK (hello JustBoom DigiHAT) or AES/EBU (hello AURALiC Aries G1).
From under the table at RMAF 2018, Mytek’s Michal Jurewicz talked hush-hush about his forthcoming Brooklyn derivative: the nattily-named Brooklyn Bridge.
A month down the line, the Brooklyn Bridge has seen its debut proper at Capital Audio Fest in Washington, DC, which means we too can now pull the covers off the new Mytek unit to reveal what is, in effect, a Brooklyn Plus DAC with Ethernet/USB ports and a WiFi aerial squeezing out its AES/EBU input. Inside sits Mytek’s new streaming board. Price: US$3000.
We will soon be able to stream directly to a Brooklyn DAC using WiFi or Ethernet, no third-party intervention required. The USB port beneath the Ethernet port is for streaming directly from a directly-attached USB storage device. That means we can also expect to see a Mytek-skinned control app. And if you have an allergy to hardware manufacturer-derived UPnP apps (as I do), be advised that, per Michael Lavorgna’s Twittering Machines report, the Brooklyn Bridge will be Roon Ready.
More information to follow, once I get a Brooklyn Bridge on my office desk.
Further information: Mytek
