Euphony Summus 2c and 4c server/streamer
How do you like your network player interface? Full fat or lean? It’s a decision that undoubtedly goes in Roon’s direction most of the time. Roon offers a blend of usability, stability, search and curation functionality that taken in the round is frankly unbeatable. Still, alternatives to Roon there are, and Stylus by Croatian software developer Euphony is one of them.
Stylus does not try to compete with Roon’s feature-rich environment head on, instead it aims to deliver digital music to a higher sonic standard. If we want the ultimate in sound quality, are moderately computer literate and not afraid to get under the hood of our PC, so to speak, we can buy an annual license for Stylus and install it on a compatible hardware platform of our choice, more than likely a NUC of some sort. We’re just the kind of user that Euphony had in mind when it developed Stylus. The company likes to call it the Swiss army knife of music playing software, written for those who want to tune software settings to their own hardware and listening preferences. Stylus is not intended for computer-phobics who want to tangle with nothing more complex than an on-off button.
The market, though, has a third category and that’s buyers who want better sound quality, are happy to manage a little complexity, but draw the line at going full-on geek. For them, Euphony offers the Summus servers – a turnkey package of slim and passively cooled OEM case housing a state-of-the-art NUC pre-loaded with Euphony’s Stylus music player.
Summus comes in two forms; the 4c is a single 4-core i7 device designed to function as a one-box network player, and a dual-server setup wherein a 2-core i3-based 2c device works in tandem with the more powerful server. In this guise the heavy-lifter does the processor-intensive housekeeping while the less powerful one runs Stylus Endpoint and acts as a streamer-only, liberating, says Euphony, better still sound quality.
The dual-servers come fitted and tested with Euphony’s preferred memory types and a 2TB SSD for internal storage of music files. Two Ifi Power Elite switching power supplies are included in the price of £7,200, as well as an ethernet to USB converter dongle, a short Ethernet patch lead to connect the servers to each other, and the first two-years of license for Stylus, which thereafter costs €119 a year. Plug and play? Mmmm, pretty much, it turns out.
Choices, choices
First, though, we need to decide which music playing software we want to use. Yes, the Summus servers come pre-loaded with Euphony Stylus, but interestingly they also have Roon Core, HQ Player, some alternative end-points and can operate as a renderer for any UPnP client. If that’s not enough for our money, also included is an application by Croatian developer Mozzaik that upsamples any DSD file to 256 and PCM to 768kHz. There are a good few other settings that Stylus allows us to change and, as I discovered, it is possible for the curious and hasty to inadvertently bring normal function to a halt. For such eventualities Stylus has a user-switch that allows Euphony to step in by remote control and restore service.
We might wonder why, if Stylus is as superior a music player as Euphony wants us to believe it is, the company goes to the bother of including the alternatives. I pondered this myself, and came to the conclusion that it’s actually a clever move; buyers can do a back-to-back comparison and my guess is that except for those few that just can’t live without Roon’s superior user environment, everyone else is going to be happy to renew the Stylus license fee when it falls due after two years.
The sonic differences are not subtle: Stylus opens a wider and cleaner window on recordings; un-masking detail of texture, tone and timing, and delivering a fidelity of spatial content that I actually found quite shocking. It was now evident, for example, just how many producers use panning techniques to create what they hope is extra interest for listeners. My previous go-to music playing software had failed to show me this, but Stylus did, whooshing musical events from side to side in a deep soundstage in which voices and instruments had a new and more confident location and solidity.
Shock of the new
In order to achieve the low noise floor that in part is responsible for such retrieval of detail, Euphony has done some clever stuff with its software, including throttling back the CPUs in the servers, lowering Voltages and reducing processor activity by loading tracks or whole albums into RAM before playing them.
I configured Stylus to access my Qobuz account and play files I had loaded into the Summus internal SSD and a plug-in USB memory stick. As a user interface, Stylus is less full-featured than Roon, but after the mild shock caused by the sudden change of view on the iPad had worn off, I quickly adjusted to the look and feel of Stylus. It doesn’t provide the one-page holistic view of all our files in the way that Roon does, but requires us to select a ‘storage’ tab if we want to browse our local or network-attached files, or ‘Qobuz’ (or ‘Tidal’) if we want to pick and choose from a remote library. As an interface to Qobuz (and I expect Tidal too) it gives access to the provider’s featured and new selections, as well as whatever we have saved as our favourites.
The performance of the Summus servers running Stylus with Qobuz was very satisfactory, playing familiar files with the enhanced detail already noted, but also a greater level of energy or dynamic expression, underpinned by a low-end that felt significantly more extended and nuanced. The honking bass clarinet intro to the first track on Greg Foat’s album Live At Villa Maximus, Mykonos, was delivered with impressive woody weight, and later when I played Kiki’s Tavern from the same album the psychedelic picked guitar that overlays the track sounded suitably sun-bronzed and phasey, just as it should under the heat of the Mediterranean sun.
When I switched to stored files and to the Goldberg Variations by young Dutch pianist Hannes Minnaar, the display on my reference Master Fidelity NADAC showed me that the Summus servers were sending it a 352.8MHz DXD data stream. Bert van der Wolf of Northstar Recordings, normally so very sure-footed, has mixed what I previously felt might be a rather over-generous helping of the performance space into this particular master and the De Waalse Kerk in Amsterdam contributes a lot of resonant accompaniment to Minnaar’s wonderfully clean technique. The Summus servers running Stylus made me wonder for the first time whether I might be being rather unkind to van der Wolf. Their ability to parse out the contributing elements of the recording, Minnaar at the Chris Maene straight strung concert grand piano, and the acoustic of the church, brought it together as a more coherent whole than I had heard before.
Conclusion
The Summus servers running Stylus reproduce demanding material such as this better than most of the alternatives that I have heard, mainly because of their ability to maintain temporal consistency – and that has at its root very low internal jitter. How Euphony’s software engineer Robert Devcic pulls this off on a pair of what are essentially industry-standard NUCs is for us to wonder and him to know. It’s the kind of sophistication one rarely hears from alternative players at £20,000 or more and it makes the Summus pair at a little over £7,000 all the more remarkable. Highly recommended.