Laminar Streamer

LessLoss reveals first design sketches of the Laminar Streamer direct drive SD player.



The all-new Laminar Streamer finally solves the problem of digital audio harshness by using only a single clock source for the formation of the pristine digital audio stream. Although the device plays .wav and .aiff files off of SD cards, LessLoss did not incorporate the use of Windows, MAC OS, or Linux for its operating system. Instead, from ground up, a dedicated audiophile operating system was built, streamlined for the specialized task of serving the topmost quality data while avoiding jitter. Unlike any other computer audio playback system, the Laminar Streamer's operating system runs synchronously at the audio sampling rate via the very same high quality audio clock used for the formation of the audio data stream. Thus, a new level of quality is achieved in digital playback, previously unattainable due to the inherent complexity of running an OS clock and an audio clock separately. The intricacies of asynchronous re-clocking, buffering, and jitter reduction have been solved at their very source, a world first for digital audio!

Laminar Streamer features include:

- Plays any .wav or .aiff file from any FAT32 formatted SD card. About the size of a postage stamp, a Secure Digital High-Capacity (SDHC) card is a flash memory device that can hold between 4 and 32 gigabytes (GB) of data. These cards are a form of removable memory that can be used with many different digital devices, including camcorders and computers.

- Plays any standard sampling rate files, from 44.1 kHz through 192 kHz files

- Plays 16 or 24 bit files at any standard sampling rate

- Instantly recognizes the SD card. Boot time is less than 0.1 seconds. Nothing to configure, ever. No buffering, synchronicity, latency, or compatibility issues, ever. Nor viruses. Just plug and play the perfect audiophile stream, and keep your pristine audio off the noisy grid.

- Small screen displays folder names, file names, sampling rates, absolute phase polarity, playback mode, and time.

- On-the-fly 100% digital realm absolute phase polarity switching during playback.

- in Pure Laminar Mode: screen data, position monitoring, and back-light are all turned off.

- Optically decoupled expansion port for future remote control functionality without introducing any EM interference to the subtle audio streaming process.

- S/PDIF output on RCA

- AES/EBU output on XLR

- I2S output on 5-pin connector

- Price: to be announced

The Laminar Streamer represents a convergence of two lines of design which have been established from 1982 until today. On the one hand, digital CD players have become more and more robust to deal with physical microvibration, whereas computer has been made simpler and simpler by the stripping away of unnecessary operating system functions to enable real-time audio processing to occur Jitter-free. The Laminar Streamer, built on these two foundations, represents the logical merging of these two. On the one hand, the unit is built with cutting edge Panzerholz - a wood based material which boasts some of the best vibration damping characteristics in existence. On the other hand, a special operating system has been built from the ground up which runs on the audio clock itself, bringing the Laminar Streamer SD card player into the realm beyond any computer audio system and finally bridges the gap between dedicated disc players and computer audio systems. The result is the complete absence of digital realm artifacts in the audio stream. Quality of performance issues are thus reduced to the quality of power supplied to the unit.