Vault 2i
$1999
One of our favourites from the Bluesound range has always been the Vault, because it offers something that rival systems don’t — hard-drive storage for your music. You can rip music from CDs (the recent 3.8 BluOS update added MQA-CD ripping onto the Vault), or copy it into the drive over the network, then you can play it directly into your sound system of choice, or over the network to other BluOS players and speakers around the home.
There are big advantages in hard-drive playback, notably removing the vagaries of network playback, and potentially of having the full data path under a single clock. Yet as is evident by the lack of rivals, it is not easy or cheap to achieve with the traditional reliability of consumer audio. Who trusts a hard drive? Getting this right is something that both explains the Vault’s pricing, and delivers its value — music-specific drive-based players can run to tens of thousands of dollars, and Bluesound’s is one of the cheapest.
But the Vault is not only a CD-ripping hard-drive music player. Using the BluOS app (right) you can also use the Vault as a streaming preamplifier, with two USB slots, a combo analogue/optical minijack input, plus all the ways of BluOS. There is Bluetooth streaming from your phone and also Bluetooth out to stream music to wireless headphones. And through the network the Vault can directly access all those music services. Add it to an existing system and it’ll be your music hub for the whole home.