New Blue

Bluesound is part of the Lenbrook Group of Companies, the Canadian-based group which also brings you NAD and PSB Speakers. And the complementarities between Bluesound and NAD in particular are obvious, and useful. NAD has adopted the BluOS streaming platform from Bluesound for its own smart streaming amplifiers, while Bluesound has gained substance from its stablemate from the very beginning – the great Marty Borish, the founder of modern NAD who passed away in 2017, had early input into the goals for the new streaming brand, and the development of its powered products has gained greatly through successive generations from the expertise of NAD’s amplification engineers.

But the Node streamer – here in its third (really fourth) generation – has no amplification; it’s designed mainly to plug into an existing system to bring all the streaming and file-based joys of digital music. So this is where Bluesound and the underlying BluOS can be judged on its own merits. How well does it handle the not-so-simple task of bringing all the world’s music to your home in an easy-to-use way? (Spoiler: having just won the EISA 2021-2022 Award for Digital Music Player, one might assume the answer