BRIAN ZOLNER BRICASTI DESIGN
Brian Zolner is the ‘Bri’ in Bricasti Design, a company founded by two former employees of Lexicon, joined subsequently by engineers from Madrigal Laboratories. Here, he talks to Jez Ford about the Bricasti M5 reviewed on page 50 of this issue…
Jez Ford: So tell us about your Bricasti M5 Network Player...
Brian Zolner: So we have the M5 which we announced a year ago, but we also launched before that the M12. And the idea of the M12 was what I call a source controller; it has analogue in, digital ins, so it’s a nice front-end for somebody, a preamp/DAC. And we developed the network rendering streaming interface for that product, and designed that card—the physical shape of it, how it mounts—so it could be retrofitted into any M1. So it fits in the M12, it can be put into an M1 or M1 DAC, so people can upgrade if they want, or they can order it with that.
Then I realised I could put that network rendering streaming interface in its own little box. So the M5 is this little box with the analogue power supply out of the M1 powering the network interface, and that drops down to a card we made that has a SHARC (processor) on it, and with AES and SPDIF out. Because the real idea of the product was not to use USB, the whole advantage is saying ‘let’s do this without USB’, OK? So this M5 can
