Cocktail Audio X40

amazon Cocktail Audio X40 reviews

Storing digital music on the hard drive and exporting digital files to the DAC. The Cocktail X40 is equipped with many useful extras such as the visual album cover display, CDs to hard drive, FM / Internet radio reception, headphone amp, and especially allows playback and digitization of analog sources with high lossless output.

Design, structure, and features

Owning a full-size, 430-mm full-size casing, the Cocktail X40’s first major advantage over smaller music servers today. With the large chassis, users can easily place synchronous machines on display shelves and other hi-fi devices. The midrange music server design is quite simple to design, with less investment in the material. Cocktail X40 is an exception when the machine is made of aluminum blocks up to 12mm thick, with two large knobs to adjust the volume. (Headphone amp) and multi-task rotary buttons are also CNC monolithic cut. In addition to the overall weight gain, the thicker side of the chassis and internal circuitry protects the entire chassis from vibration. It also plays an important role in stabilizing the slot-style CD motors.

Compared to other music servers in the same segment, the Cocktail X40 has a superior design due to its built-in 800x480pixel 5 inch TFT LCD for menu navigation, name and track information, and album art. In addition to the built-in display, you can export the X40’s menu view to the external monitor via the HDMI port. A large display screen will make it easy to find your music store, especially the thousands of lossless streams of your library tracks through the fast and convenient album art.
It isn’t easy to classify the Cocktail Audio X40 into a certain product category because the main function is a music server. This device is considered a “music hub,” where you can connect any audio source, From lossless, digital, network streaming, even charcoal disc players without additional accessories.

The main function of the Cocktail X40 is still a music server with the ability to store and access lossless content from the hard drive. The machine is designed portable hard drive tray on the back for easy disassembly without opening the lid. The Cocktail X40 supports a 2.5-inch solid-state drive and 3.5-inch optical drives of up to 4TB. Plus, with three USB 2.0 ports, you can expand your music sources with USB flash drives and external hard drives. The X40 is compatible with the lossless PCM file up to 32Bit / 384kHz, DXD 24Bit / 352.8KHz, and especially supports high-resolution DSD 64/128 (5.6448MHz) track, which is also the main difference compared to Cocktail X30.

The Cocktail X40 features a high-end DAC system incorporating 32Mit / 500MIPS DSP and D / A Stereo ESS Saber32 DAC 9018K2M DAC. The ESS Saber 32 (32bit) D / A decoder is one of the most highly regarded chips due to its proprietary Time Domain Jitter Eliminator technology, which eliminates jitter and distortion, and produces very good THD distortion High “analog.” The XMOS DSP processor will play a role in limiting the noise in the filter layer. In addition, on the X40, Cocktail Audio was first equipped with a toroidal converter to prevent electromagnetic interference from affecting sensitive D / A circuits.

Rather than using a computer and professional Rip software to digitize the CD collection, the Cocktail X40 comes equipped with LG’s DVD Writer slot-in-one (DVD) drive and 1MB buffer. Proper playback and rip ensure the “bit-perfect” standard. With five file formats, WAV, FLAC, ALAC, MP3, or OGG, the machine supports automatic copying of metadata (name, author, etc.) into digitized files. Converting music tracks is not a complicated but useful feature. Cocktail X40 allows the conversion of (format) music files in the library of the machine. This feature is especially handy when users want to lower the resolution of lossless files to lower levels such as MP3, M4A, ACC to load into memory devices such as smartphones, tablets …

Not only does it support ripping music from the CD store, but the Cocktail X40 also features a unique function that digitizes analog sources such as tape heads, mortars, and coal plates. Users can connect directly and play music from the charger (using the MM needle) with the X40 without adding a phono box. In addition, the Cocktail X40 captures all content from LP, tape, or mortar in 24bit / 192kHz digital file format via high-end analog-to-digital (ADC) chip standard studio. It can be said that the X40 is one of the devices that allow analog audio to be digitized most professionally today. After recording all the recordings, the recorder split the track and especially support placing TAGs for each channel with full information about the album, artist, song title, and album cover image.

The Cocktail X40 comes with an integrated FM tuner and supports Internet Radio. The music server can record newsletters and tracks played on Internet Radio, even with pre-set recording times corresponding to your favorite broadcast schedule. The X40 does not have a built-in wifi receiver, but users can add wifi dongle 802.11b / g / n dongle. With the internet connection established, Cocktail Audio X40 continues to expand its capabilities. First, you can play music from iOS devices to the X40 via the AirPlay protocol. Users can remotely access the digital music library stored on the NAS hard disk and audio files stored on a computer with the same WLAN. Another utility over the network connection is the intuitive management and operation of “copy, delete, rename, imports, exports” between the hard drive stored in the X40, the NAS, and the PC. Finally, with a networked computer, smartphone or tablet, and IP address of the machine, you can easily access the Cocktail X40 remotely through the Web Interface.

where can you get a Cocktail Audio X40 online

Cocktail Audio X40 Black DSD HD Hi-Res Music Server/ CD Ripper/ 32bit DAC/ Streamer: Buy it now

Cocktail Audio – X40 HD DSD & DXD Music Server in Silver: Buy it now

Set up, use, and experience demonstration quality

As a “music hub” with many features but the set-up Cocktail X40 is also very light. After attaching the hard drive, booting the machine, the user will be guided through the basic set-up steps such as language selection, Rip file format, network connection settings, set time. In the case of an unformatted hard drive, X40 will require formatting on the machine. 5 inch LCD for sharp images and text. The device allows the display in different modes, in which the cover type is easiest to use.

First, we ripped some C.D.s into a 3.5 “2 T.B. hard drive. Cocktail X40 allows you to select one of 4 Rip file formats, including MP3, OGG, WAV, and FLAC, of ​​which WAV is the default format. With 2 T.B. of hard drive space, we estimate it can store around 2,600 WAV decks and 7,800 CDs with FLAC. Files are ripped by default with metadata information; in addition, the X40 supports links to data sources from “FreeDB.org” to add TAG information. For compressed formats such as MP3, OGG, the machine allows for recording quality and bit-rate. A nice feature of the Cocktail X40 is its backup capability if the Rip is broken for some reason. To enable the backup feature, the user needs to add one. The external hard drive is bigger than the internal hard drive. Besides the ability to rip music from CD to hard drive, the X40 also allows you to rip music from CD to USB flash drive.

We tried Rip track “Song For My Father” on the album Shine On by Sarah McLachlan. Difficult to distinguish the quality of the performance when playing Rip files from the hard drive compared to the direction from the original CD. Thanks to the ability to rip the standard Bit-Perfect, common faults such as high-frequency distortion or total hardness due to jitter are absent except for very small changes in dynamic range and ultra-high-frequency range.

The significant advantage of the Cocktail X40 is the compatibility with DSD files, along with the power of the high-end ESS Saber32 DAC 9018K2M decoder. Experience a few DSD64 and 128 tracks on the Adamanetes Diapason KARIS N.W. AVM Evolution A5.2 Integrated Amplifier and Supra Cables. Multifunctional devices such as the Cocktail X40 at midrange prices have made us so much more surprised by the ability to perform natural, neutral colors, especially the low noise advantage. Most of The DAC music servers with the same price range appear.

The most significant extension of the Cocktail X40 is the digitization of analog sources, particularly from the charcoal-burner and high-quality 192kHz / 24bit file terminals. We also dealt with A-to-D encoding from L.P.s with Opera Consonance Droplet LP3.1 and Goldring MM cartridge. That is also the digitization system from the best vinyl recordable vinyl record we’ve ever experienced. While it is impossible to keep all the fluidity and color, the digital files obtained are very detailed and dynamic. In addition, allowing splitting of files and placing TAG information, and inserting album covers into files with the correct operation on the Cocktail X40 is a perfect complement to this unique feature.