From Hi-Fi World - November 2015 issue

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Box Clever

Vinyl replay and recording, high-resolution digital, streaming and amplification all converge in Entotem’s new Plato. Jon Myles explains.

There have never been more ways to listen to and store music at home. Once we had vinyl or the radio. While both are still going strong they’ve now been joined by CD, Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, iPods, high-resolution digital music players, internet radio, home computers, streaming services and...well, the list seems to grow  longer each passing year.

   And while that gives consumers a welcome degree of choice, it also means our music collections are becoming increasingly fractured between various different formats. Rare, nowadays, is the listener whose entire library is stored on just one physical format such as LP or CD.

   The obvious downside to this is the increasing number of hi-fi components needed to play all these different formats. My own system, for example, comprises a turntable, DAC, CD player, two NAS drives, streamer, amplifier and a couple of high-resolution portable digital music players. And, of course, all the associated cables to tie everything together.

The front panel touch-screen TFT display shows full album artwork and titles to

make sorting through your music collection quick and easy...

So how convenient would it be if you could slim this down to a single box which not only looks good but sounds good as well? That’s the thinking behind the new Plato from UK-based company Entotem.