Sound in the main is good. It’s essentially a very good
music server with an amp, rather than a very good all-rounder; the 50W
amplifier on board is good, but will never set the world alight. In a way, it’s
got a touch of the valve amp to the sound, in that it’s slightly warm and
mellifluous, rather than having a taut grip over the loudspeakers. Some of this
depends on the loudspeakers used; big woofers with lots of cone excursion are
probably not on the radar because they generally come in more expensive boxes
these days, but when used with smaller, higher sensitivity cones the CA-X30
sounds extremely pleasing in a slightly laid-back manner. The headphone
amplifier section is similarly specified; it’s rich and warm for most
headphones, but won’t drive difficult loads at high volumes.
Versatile network
functions through many network protocol support
The amp is barely half the story, though. The ripping
quality was exceptionally good. It made short work of a small selection of
discs ripped in WAV, giving transparent-to-source rips of all of them. In
particular, it gave an excellent sense of space around Gregory Porter’s voice
on the title track of Liquid Spirit [Blue Note], got easily behind the schizzy
rhythms of ‘Singapore’ on Tom Waits Rain Dogs [Island], coped well with Jessye
Norman’s powerful rendition of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs [Decca], and
showed due refinement when playing Bach’s Art of Fugue, by the Emerson String
Quartet [DG]. It didn’t do a bad job at MP3, either, with a 320kpbs rip of Pat
Metheny and the late Charlie Haden’s Beyond the Missouri Sky [Verve]. Here
though, there was a distinct watery-wobbly sound to the guitar parts, and the
bass was moving around the soundstage a little too much for comfort.
You can connect to
your TV to view a slideshow of photos while listening to your tracks
Other sources acquitted themselves well, too. FM radio was
crisp and sensitive enough not to need the Mother of all Aerials to pick up a
signal, thereby keeping noise low. Internet radio was more variable, as
reflects the variable sound quality, but the ‘sorted’ lossy compression on
ripped discs seemed to apply to internet radio too, making lower quality
streams sound less harsh, spitchy, and watery.
The Cocktail Audio CA-X30 is not perfect by any means, but
it acquits itself well. It notionally faces some stiff opposition from home
teams, but in fact all of this stiff opposition actually costs several times
what the X30 does. Sadly, that gets forgotten about when evaluating the unit on
the basis of sound quality alone. No-one who uses a Naim SuperUniti or a Cyrus
Lyric 09 is going to settle for the Cocktail Audio X30, in the same way no-one
who drives around in a Porsche Cayman is going to settle for a Ford Ka. There’s
also a touch of the macho at play here; the CA-X30 does not lend itself to
‘winging it’; you need to set your system up thoroughly, with manual on one
knee and remote on the other. Do this and you are rewarded with good performance.
Don’t and there is a lot of head-scratching involved.
CA X30 supports
3.5” SATA hard disk, 2.5” SATA hard disk or solid state drive (SSD) as storage
Cocktail Audio has made a no-frills audio system here, but
scratch the surface and that’s a remarkably comprehensive, no-frills audio
system at a very fair price. You need one hand on the manual while learning the
interface, but the end result is a highly configurable, extremely flexible,
one-box system that works as well as you can make it work. A solid recommendation.
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Technical Specifications
·
Type: Solid-state, music server, media centre, CD ripper, and
streamer, with built-in DAC, headphone amplifier, 2-channel integrated
amplifier ·
Supported audio formats: APE/CUE, MP3, HD WAV, HD FLAC, WAV,
WMA, M4A, Apple Lossless, AAC, AIFF, AIF, Ogg Vorbis, PCM, Playlist (PLS,
M3U) ·
Supported Network Protocols: UPnP server/client/ media
renderer, Samba server/client, FTP server, Web server, etc ·
Internet Radio provider: Reciva ·
Analogue inputs: one single-ended line-level inputs (via RCA
jacks), one one 3.5mm jack ·
Analogue outputs: One pre-power loop (via RCA jacks), one
6.35mm headphone jack ·
Digital inputs: Two S/PDIF (one coaxial, one optical), 3x host
USB port. Wired and wireless Ethernet ·
Digital outputs: Two S/PDIF (one coaxial, one optical), 1
AES/EBU ·
Supported sample rates: to 24/192 all round ·
Output: 50Wpc @ 8 Ohms ·
Bandwidth: Not specified ·
Distortion: THD
·
Headphone Loads: not specified ·
Dimensions (HxWxD): 99 x 435 x 325mm ·
Weight: varies according to HDD supplied ·
Price: from $1,450
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