Bluesound brings Cambridge Audio to brand new flagship: hi-res music streamer

I’ve always liked Bluesound’s naming conventions for its music streamers, which have been around for 13 years now. In medical terms, nodes are tiny filters throughout the body, while in more general language, a node can mean a point in a network where lines or paths intersect. It seems especially apt now, though, because Lenbrook (which owns Bluesound, as well as NAD and PSB Speakers) tells me that the Bluesound team has identified 17 points of change in the audio signal path of a musical recording, from the moment a performer sings into a microphone to the moment a listener hears it—think mic level, patchbay, audio interfaces, processing, and so on.

Interesting, right? That’s 17 chances for the authenticity of a recording to be diminished a little bit – and Bluesound doesn’t want that. The team is all ardent fans of live music, so the aim of the Node series, says Bluesound, is to “make digital disappear” – that is, to remove those potential pitfalls down the chain.

And Bluesound has three options with which it intends to achieve this, from the smaller Node Nano to the latest and largest Node Icon. It doesn’t take a genius to see that Bluesound is clearly trying to take on the Cambridge Audio CXN100 network player with this foray into more elite territory – after all, the flagship Node Icon, the most expensive of the trio, costs exactly the same. And I have to say, first of all, I rather like it.

Know your nodes