Over the Moon
CANADA’S SIMAUDIO has been designing and manufacturing audio electronic components from its home base in Quebec for almost four decades. While the company’s product lineup clearly skews toward the high end—a pair of its flagship Moon 888 monoblock amplifiers will run you around $120,000—the company also makes a wide range of other components with more approachable price tags. A number of these, such as the Moon 390 preamplifier ($5,300) we have under review here, feature the MiND 2 streaming module, a built-in network player that lets you stream audio from services like Tidal, Qobuz, and Deezer, along with files stored on a NAS or USB drive or computer. Not only that, but the Moon 390’s multiroom capability allows it to stream signals from its digital or analog inputs to other MiND 2-enabled products—the company’s ACE integrated amplifier, for example—that are attached to your home’s network.
What differentiates the Moon 390 from many other network audio players is its particular emphasis on high-res streaming. MQA decoding is onboard to play Tidal Masters tracks with up to 24-bit/192kHz resolution, and you can also stream the 24-bit/192kHz tracks available on Qobuz’s Studio and Sublime+ tiers. The column).
