Bluesound takes it to Cambridge Audio with an all-new flagship hi-res music streamer

I’ve always loved Bluesound’s naming of its music streamers, which are now into their 13th year of existence. In medical terms, nodes are little filters throughout the body, while in more general language a node can mean a point in a network at which lines or pathways intersect. It seems especially apt now though, because Lenbrook (which owns Bluesound, as well as NAD and PSB Speakers) tells me the Bluesound team identified 17 points of change in the audio signal path of a musical recording, from the moment an artist sings into a mic, to a listener hearing it – think mic level, patchbay, audio interfaces, processing and so on.

Interesting, no? That’s 17 chances for the authenticity of a recording to falter just a little – and Bluesound doesn’t want that. The team are all avid live-music fans, so the aim of the Node range, says Bluesound, is to “make digital disappear” – i.e., to make those potential pitfalls in the chain go away.

And Bluesound’s got three options with which it aims to achieve this, from the smaller Node Nano up to the newest and largest Node Icon. You don’t have to be a genius to see that with this foray into more elite territory, Bluesound clearly wants to take on the Cambridge Audio CXN100 network player – because the flagship Node Icon, the priciest of the trio, costs precisely the same money. And initially, I have to say I like it.

Know your Nodes