Moon Nēo ACE
‘A Complete Experience’ is the acronym behind Moon’s Nēo ACE — a solid integrated amplifier with networking music sources built in.
Simaudio’s Moon brand is quite the high-ender, all still built in Canada as well as designed there, everything coming with 10-year warranties, and rising up to some very serious gear indeed. This Moon Neo ACE comes in at $4999, making it (just) the most expensive in our little group of smart amps this issue — but when you peer upwards at the likes of Moon’s Evolution 780D, which is over $20k and is just a DAC (well, not ‘just’, it’s a Sound+Image award-winning DAC for a start), you realise this little ‘ACE’ is offering a great deal of Moon goodness for the money, being an integrated amplifier with both an internal DAC and the company’s MiND networking streaming system, app control an’ all.
Equipment
Moon does like its acronyms. ‘ACE’ is noted in its literature as indicating ‘A Complete Experience’, since the inclusion of the MiND smarts means you could just add speakers to enjoy a complete system. Oh, and MiND stands for ‘MOON intelligent Network Device’ — we’re not sure why the ‘i’ isn’t capitalised, except that it makes for a nice graphic with the dot of the ‘i’ pulsing away with networking goodness. Neo gets a little flat accent on the ‘e’, and MOON itself is all capitalised, perhaps another acronym lost in the mists of corporate time since its first appearance in 1997 (Simaudio itself dates back to 1980, as Sima Electronics). So, typography sorted, what do we have here? First there’s the Neo ACE’s fundamental role as integrated amplifier. It’s rated by Moon at 50W per channel into eight ohms, fairly modest by Moon standards compared to, say, its latest ‘888’ power amp which delivers a staggering 888W. Yet on paper the quality is still impressively high. The Neo ACE’s quoted IMD (0.005% and THD at 0.02% from 20Hz to 20kHz full power) is actually lower than is quoted for the massive 888. And for Moon there’s none of the Class-D used on all the others here in some form — indeed it operates in Class A for the first five watts to avoid potential crossover distortion from the four bipolar transistors in the Class-AB output stage.
For those who love their high-res files, the Neo ACE’s frequency response extends up to 80kHz at -3dB (the ‘888’ can handle 200kHz!).
There’s a healthy selection of socketry to handle external sources. There are four analogue inputs — a moving magnet phono input for a turntable (hoorah), two line-level inputs on RCA pairs, plus a third on the front as a minijack socket, handy for casual plugging up of a portable device. But there’s also Bluetooth built-in, so such portables can be played from the sofa at the cost of some quality loss from Bluetooth transmission. There’s no mention of AAC codec Bluetooth support for Apple device owners, but the aptX codec is supported, so aptX-compatible Android phones can deliver at darned close to CD quality.
That Bluetooth is the first of an impressive six digital inputs — the others are USB-B for a computer, two optical and two coaxial. Plus there is digital input via networking from either Wi-Fi or Ethernet inputs.
You get a high-quality physical remote control, and there’s also rear socketry for RS-232 and IR control, plus the company’s SimLink between components.
Then there’s the clever stuff, which activates when you select the ‘Network’ input, download the MiND app
to your smart device of choice and start zapping stuff through your network connection (Ethernet if you can, otherwise Wi-Fi).
All the digital stuff is served by a DAC which delivers PCM decoding up to a well future-proofed 32-bit/384kHz, and DSD decoding up to DSD256 and PCM.
Performance
Things were as easy to set up and get working as for any average integrated amplifier. We used the Neo ACE first in a living room context with analogue and digital music sources, including a number of recently reviewed turntables (the phono stage proved excellent), and also handling TV/movie sound on optical from the TV and analogue stereo from an Oppo Blu-ray player.
The stereo outputs on the back can be used for a subwoofer or a separate power amplifier, but they are under the control of the volume knob and cannot be switched to fixed level, and they are muted by the headphone socket. That’s a pity, as it precludes their use with a recorder (unless you’re very careful with the volume) or to feed, say, a pair of wireless headphones like the Sennheiser RS series or its Flex 5000 reviewed last issue.
The remote control, while of high quality, was a bit hard to read in less than bright light and we found the layout ergonomically confusing, with volume using two buttons vertically but input selection and balance alongside using two buttons horizontally, the logic of the latter taking us a good while to assimilate. But you’re guided helpfully by the attractive OLED display showing the input names, and even better you can rename each input using the menus accessed from the front panel, so we changed Optical 2 to ‘TV’, and so on. (Less usefully it forgot all these after we left it unplugged for a fortnight.) Through the same menus you can set a level offset for each input, and even disable inputs you’re not using; excellent versatility. Inputs can be configured as full-level pass-through for home theatre bypass mode, though take the usual great care if trying this.
“A quiet but versatile workhorse with the guts and quality to scale up for powerful hi-fi sound when desired...”
We left the MiND section until last, and it proved to be aptly named, in terms of having to get your head around things to set it up. It’s easier to describe what it does — it’s a network and internet music streamer, controlled by an iOS or Android app (for several years MiND had no Android control, but that’s now available). There is internet radio, Tidal, and DLNA/UPnP network streaming with excellent codec support — MP3, AAC, WMA, Ogg, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV and FLAC up to 24-bit/192kHz.
We expected some degree of set-up complexity — networking is rarely easy. So we carefully followed the instructions. The NEO Ace’s printed manual tells you to download a separate MiND manual, so we did. A page in, that MiND manual tells you to download a separate MiND set-up guide, so we did. That MiND set-up guide recommends immediately checking that your MiND hardware has the latest firmware update and refers you to a YouTube video for instructions. The YouTube video went through a lot of power cable yanking and sticking of pens into holes on the back panel, but it was all specific to Moon’s separate MiND 180 component, not the Neo ACE at all. Now having the printed guide and four browser tabs open, we decided to stop reading and just see what happened if we downloaded the app and got on with it. Sure enough, immediate success. With the network (MiND) input selected on the amplifier we opened the app on our iPad Pro and it connected immediately with the MiND streamer in the Neo ACE, and almost as immediately prompted us to update the firmware with the mere press of a button. So much for all the instructions!
After a 15-minute update we returned to find the app ready to play from vTuner internet radio or podcasts, Deezer or Tidal (a three-month Tidal subscription was in the box), from the iPad itself, or from any visible UPnP media server on our network. It showed both our high-res NAS drive collections, and played beautifully from the Asset UPnP server we’ve recently installed on our Mac to share our iTunes collection.
It didn’t (couldn’t) show our iTunes playlists, nor, unusually, the playlists on our iPad itself. On the iPhone-sized app the two volume buttons (not a slider) are only shown on the ‘Now Playing’ screen, but on the larger iPad screen, they remain always available.
On the unit itself, of course, there is a lovely large and lightly-weighted knob, along with the various press studs and a display that scrolls track details, file quality, volume and more — you can dim this (three levels) though apparently not disable it. The remote’s transport keys work when MiND streaming, which is nice.
We were able to use the MiND app easily to build queues of music from available servers, navigating via the usual choices (artist/album/song/folder etc.), and the queue can be easily edited, reordered, and even stored for future use. We did find some navigation limitations. The app didn’t pick up much artwork, and albums rarely listed tracks in order, regardless of how they were accessed. Network playback was good for PCM to 192kHz but DSD files failed to play — the manual says DSD64 should network, but not the higher types; all are fine via USB playback, as is PCM up to 384kHz.
Playback quality, on the other hand, was fine indeed, with the ACE’s DAC and amplification excelling in delivering all manner of replay, and especially once we relocated to the music room and plugged in the Mac Mini music machine to its USB-B socket. In this way the ACE is good to a stratospheric 32-bit/384kHz (indeed our Mac defaulted to giving it 384kHz for everything, so we brought Amarra software into play to deliver the native sample rates).
At casual listening levels, the ACE simply passed the quality of source; Bluetooth, Spotify and lossless all emerging enjoyably listenable. But the ACE comes into its own with good files played at higher levels — a humble 50W per channel it may be rated, but it showed its strengths by scaling to serious listening levels without any sign of rising distortion. It drove our JBL Studio Monitors with glee and indeed proved to have enough reserve power to create serious room-snapping dynamics with full weight. The 96k remasters of Led Zep III sounded so zingy and focused that we had to fetch the vinyl to be sure it still sounded better (which, thanks to our Thorens and the clarity of the ACE’s excellent phono stage, it did).
Through MiND we were soon browsing through a relatively rarely-used WD NAS drive via UPnP. We found Philip Glass’s ‘1000 Airplanes on the Roof’, a fine work which is scored for part chamber recording, part electronic synth, and such was the speedy punch and low-end impact of this that we were somewhat astonished to note on the MiND app that the file was a mere 160k MP3. It shows how easily it is to listen through low-res codecs if they’re all you have, but also how well the ACE’s DAC and amp create something of beauty from a limited source. We were transported by an instrumental of ELO’s Telephone
Line, an extra from a possibly legitimate
download of ‘A New World Record’, its tape hiss not preventing a vinyl-like richness to strings, choir and Bev Bevan’s Ringo-style backbeat. We let the album play on.
Having some nice headphones to hand, including Focal’s high-end Utopia, we enjoyed delights from the ACE’s front headphone socket. The timing and delicacy of the piano on Keith Jarrett & Chrlie Haden’s ‘Round Midnight... the tone and timbre of the opening bass on Holly Cole’s Girl Talk (88.2kHz), the smallroom acoustic on her vocal: we listened on past midnight.
We should not conclude without praising the styling and build here; the pictures don’t do justice to its classy looks. It uses solid aluminium with a brushed metal central fascia, and only when packing it up did we notice the bulging end cheeks seem to be some kind of high quality plastic. There is a lovely large and lightlyweighted knob, along with the various press studs and a display that scrolls track details, file quality, volume and more — you can dim this (three levels) though apparently not disable it. Simaudio calls it “affordable luxury”, which is a nice way of putting it. Conclusion We will miss the combination of conveninence and enjoyment delivered by the Neo ACE — it’s a quiet but versatile workhorse for casual listening and TV/movie sound, but it has the guts and quality to scale up for powerful hi-fi sound when desired.