REVIEW

Personally, I doubt that folk buying this will give two hoots about the minutiae and will just want a unit that is easy to set up, simple to use, and sounds great. For me, the whole point of a product like the ALTAIR G1.1 is its simplicity and its no-nonsense approach to getting to the important business of being able to enjoy your tunes.

The packaging is excellent!

Set Up

The inner box that the Auralic unit arrived in welcomes you with the statement on the box “ Where High_T4ech Meets Hi-Fi” which I kind of like in the sense that it suggests to me that we are dealing with a company that has done all the gubbins that doesn’t interest me so I don’t have to do it in order for me to get the HiFi experience I want. I. like many folk, have no interest in the whys and wherefores of a product; I want to plug it in and have it make music. Let’s see how the Auralic fares in this respect.

In the past I’ve sort of eschewed the whole LIGHTNING DS control of the Auralic unit we have as I use ROON to choose the tunes I listen to etc. I’m a creature of habit and ROON is what I know and is an integral part of my review setup and so it seemed natural to use it. However, let’s have a look at what LIGHTNING DS is.

According to the AURALIC site, this app (iOS only) is how you control the playback of your digital music library and how you access internet streaming services. It also allows you into settings of the unit so you don’t have to go through the whole (pretty simple) menu-diving options you would access from the front of the unit itself. It will allow you to see album art, the file type, and bitrate/resolution of whatever is playing, too.

One of the immediate, and perhaps the only issue I have with LIGHTNING DS (and having read the company information about it) is that a big library of, for example, a million songs will take up 1.8GB of storage on your phone BUT this does not include the album art cache and the company’s own literature suggests that you will need around 50 GB of storage on your mobile device just for the artwork. It also says that the initial setup of your library is likely to be very slow. Given these requirements and my iOS device not really being up to muster, I see there may be a problem with actually using LIGHTNING DS for the actual music control side of its functionality and I foresee me using ROON to play tunes for the most part and use LIGHTNING DS (whether on the web-browser or on the iOS device) to sort out playback parameters and for set up. If you have a more iOS-based outlook then I imagine LIGHTNING DS will be your “one-stop-shop” for everything you need to do with the ALTAIR and you may never feel the need to invest in ROON. However, and importantly, you can access LIGHTNING DS via your PC by putting the unit into hotspot mode and connecting your computer to it. All very simple if that is your preferred method. The truth is that I’m a bit old-skool when it comes to all this and I do find menu-diving to be a much easier and more intuitive way of setting kit up. I think this is possibly a generational thing and I imagine that most folk that are either younger or more network and computer savvy will much prefer the convenience of having all this on a screen and being able to see everything on one screen.

Anyway, the whole setup is pretty intuitive; turn the device on, check for updates (there was one and I installed it (press a menu button)), click on the Network Set up section of the menu, click on wireless connection, and add the password of the network. I then added the new device to ROON and we had music. The whole job from start to finish takes literally five minutes and with most of that being taken up scrolling through the screens “keyboard” with the silver knob on the right-hand side of the ALTAIR G1.1. This setup will be quicker for those using the web or iOS-based interface, I’m sure.

For the duration of the review I used the tunes stored on our NAS but there is also the option to connect an external HDD or even to connect external sources and use the ALTAIR’s DAC via TOS, COAX, or AES which will allow files up to 24Bit/192kHz. If you connect to the unit via the HS USB cable rates up to 32/384 and DSD 512 are available, though Windows users will need to download the appropriate driver.

Outputs on the ALTAIR are either via RCA or XLR and so you could connect it directly to your power amplifiers and control the volume via the app. However, I wanted to use this in my usual setup and had it input to our LAB 12 pre via RCA connectors. I’m aware this sort of flies in the face of what I said about the whole one box plus speakers thing, but I