T+A Caruso R
I’ve been on a Kim Gordon kick lately. It began a few months ago with rediscovering some Sonic Youth albums and picking up Gordon’s solo record, No Home Record. I recently finished reading her memoir, Girl in a Band, about her life, art, and musical career. I tend to read books rather than listen to them, but this time I listened with the Audible app, and I found the experience compelling. Gordon’s delivery is direct, her voice even-keeled, almost deadpan. She’s giving us the straight dope. Subtle inflections are detectable: moments when she felt strong and proud; leftover cobwebs of postbreakup pain. Her humanity came through.
This experience marked the first time I’d listened to spokenword media on a hi-fi system. That system was T+A’s Caruso R multisource receiver ($4100) coupled with the same company’s S 10 floorstanding loudspeakers ($3500/pair). Audible was sending the narration to the Caruso from my iPhone via AirPlay. AirPlay may not be hi-rez, but it was convenient, worked well, and was more than adequate for the use I was putting it to.
The Caruso R is part of T+A’s Caruso line of compact, multifunction products. The R is a full-featured, two-channel, multisource receiver/player with DSP. Plus, it’s a networked integrated amplifier with a CD transport and a streaming DAC. It has Apple AirPlay 2 and Qualcomm aptX Bluetooth (A2DP 1.2 for audio), which works in both directions—you can send music to it or from it—and it receives old-fashioned FM radio (telescopic antenna included) plus internet radio via Airable. (For any Europeans and other outlanders reading this, there’s also DAB+.)
The R supports the usual streaming services: Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer, Spotify Connect (third-party), and Amazon Music, the last with Alexa support. It has been tested by Roon, is fully interoperable with Roon, and is automatically identified by Roon as an endpoint. But because it interacts with Roon via AirPlay, it does not qualify for either of Roon’s current formal certifications, Roon Ready and Roon Tested. The AirPlay-based connection means that Roon will downsample hi-rez data sent to the R over the network to 16/44.1. There is a Roon
