THE ROAD TO BUGATTI   £175,400   

Welcome to Lotus suggested systems 2024. I first wrote a similar article back in 2017 and it proved very popular. Since then technology, products and prices have changed dramatically. Given that this hobby of ours is all about finding magically synergistic combinations, creating beautiful alchemy with a carefully curated recipe of differing products, a new and updated version of suggested systems would not go amiss. This time around though I would like to photograph and explore each setup for real; no easy or quick task in itself. As a result I will be publishing each suggested system in isolation when time permits, and then at some stage, conflate them all into one master article. I hope you enjoy the results.

We begin with our most popular and most important system of the last 2 years. This is not an easy system to describe, in part because its simplicity, its modest specification, two box form factor and indeed its price tag so completely belie its astonishing level of sound quality. Most of this system came about because of trickle down technology from Tidal’s highly ambitious Bugatti project, the factory’s no holds barred multi million pound effort to build the very best hifi system they could for the world’s number one manufacturer of hypercars. So an appreciation of that project will help to describe what we have here.

First a few facts to set the stage. This system (except combined with the Contriva loudspeakers which in pure quality terms are really the same as the Piano) would have been nominated as Parttimeaudiophile’s best system of the entire Munich High End show in June 2023, had it not been for the flagship Tidal for Bugatti system also being present; so he awarded it second best sound of show. If you have ever been to the Munich event, you will understand that that alone is a fairly alarming revelation given the complexity, cost and elaborateness of most of the big hitter rooms there every year. Two slimline boxes, one XLR, a 12kg class D amplifier, best sound of the biggest Hifi show on the planet, bar the Bugatti system which was sitting in the far end of the very same room. Other publications of course have since heaped similar accolades on both these setups, a few of which have been linked to from my News section.

One would be forgiven for underestimating the performance of a system that does not split the front end up into Streamer, DAC, Clock and Upsampler, the amplification into preamp, monoblock power amps either class A or AB, and the Loudspeakers into towering multi-driver 200kg+ floorstanders. But as mentioned the electronics here came about because of the gargantuan effort by Tidal during their creation of the flagship Bugatti system which necessitated small footprint electronics and simple mode of operation. Tidal not only achieved this end to remarkable effect (the Royale speakers are half the size of the La Assoluta but outperform them in every metric) but they also discovered that by combining elements and shortening or even removing pathways and socketry, the sonic gains were enormous. More complex and bigger is not always better,

The Contros front end then is essentially the Bugatti MC-1 digital front end reworked and slightly diluted down as a Tidal product. Inside the single chassis is an Arkas derived streamer mated to a Camira Mk2 DAC and an ingenious non-digital volume control which is quite possibly even more transparent than the Prisma Preamp. If you did split Contros up into those component pieces and bought the extra required cables too, the cost would be somewhere around £125,000. Well over twice the price.

Exactly how good are these individual components ? Well they are all the best I can sell you. The Arkas is our highest performing streamer and the same sonic level as the well regarded Taiko SGM Extreme, the Camira is currently the best DAC I sell (barring the stratospherically priced Wadax Atlantis Reference) and the Prisma preamp will hold its own against its older brother the £70,000 Precensio. Put another way, this front end would walk all over the source and preamp from the best and most expensive suggested system from my 2017 article, Melco N1-ZS/Camira Mk1/Precensio, which at that time was state of the art. It’s almost half the money too.

Moving on to the Intra power amp, the Bugatti Royale speakers use something very similar in active form, 3 distinct units to be precise, encased within each 500lb loudspeaker. As a Tidal it was fashioned with slightly lesser components and born as a single featherweight and highly compact stereo power and yes – sharp intake of breath – it was conceived as a Class D design to satisfy space and heat requirements but the factory spent a long time and an awful lot of hard work deciphering why Class D typically sounds so brittle and sterile and how it could be made to sound like a true Tidal. The answer lay not in just one ground breaking technology but a whole array of small steps and accompanying solutions.

The result is indeed a true Tidal, even more Tidal in fact than its predecessor if truth be told. It is half the size and a third of the weight of the outgoing and much loved Class AB Impulse yet unbelievably it is actually more liquid, more harmonically adept and simply more see through and a grade purer again. In the case of one Tidal customer, the Class D Intra was “sweeter and more tonally glowing” than his very exotic and expensive 300B Triode mono blocks which it replaced, not to mention way faster, dynamic and grainless. We had another customer upgrade from his £60,000 premium high end Mono blocks into the Intra too. Sure the huge and optically impressive big name monos had larger ultimate grunt but the Intra at less than half the money and in a discreet box you could lift with one hand, was simply more transparent, more invisible and a lot more musical.

At last we come to the Pianos, now in G3 form and in truth a different beast from the outgoing G2. The Piano is one of Jorn’s most loved creations. With much affection he has stated more than once that it was the first speaker he ever produced and it will also probably be the last. Unlike most speaker ranges though, the sound quality from the entry Piano Diacera is as high as any other Tidal. This is a transducer that has resolution, finesse, delicacy, purity of tone and a degree of musical communication that is seldom found in any loudspeaker regardless of price or what strata it might occupy within a given manufacturer’s brochure. And that Tidal “fairy dust” top end; I have simply never heard that in any other brand of speaker.

What the latest G3 model means though is the Piano is no longer a more specialised 2 way experience for customers with small rooms or less requirement for vast amounts of bass. Not only is the G3 just more insightful and transparent through the entire range, but the bass response has been upgraded dramatically. This speaker now behaves like a full range floorstander. The power and scale in the lower registers is truly remarkable for the Piano form factor and the modest sub 6 inch woofers. They are transparent and true to an extraordinary depth and in my demo room that you see in the pictures I had to set the lower woofer to “linear mode” rather than the extra bass mode. This is the first time I ever felt the need to reduce the bass setting with a Piano.

The G3 is now a speaker for nearly all people, all rooms and all solutions. It is the complete solution for all genres of music and listening levels. I would estimate that as a transducer, it eclipses the outgoing Contriva G2 in performance and Piano or Contriva will now be much more pertinent question when building a Tidal system. Hard to believe but yes, this is how much Jorn has moved the G3 range on.

Suggested System with Cloud Macassar Piano G3

A full Tidal system then, from streamer to source, amplifier, cables and loudspeakers. Simply plug into the home network and operate stored files, radio or Qobuz using your choice of app: Jplay, Lumin or Roon. There are very few manufacturer’s out there in existence who can furnish you with a completely interlocking top to tail system in this way, certainly none at this quality level of both sonics and craftsmanship. Its completeness, its dreamlike synergy is guaranteed. Even the voicing of the mains cables has a very special way of syncopating with the sound of the electronics and whilst Tidal boxes can make an incredible system into say a Rockport, Vimberg or an Avalon, you will never fully understand them until you run them into Tidal speakers. The same holds true of the reverse.

What does this system sound like ? Quite simply, classic Tidal which means it delivers a purity, a naturalness, a sense of calm and a feeling of exquisite beauty which tends to so completely overwhelm most people who hear it. Founder Jorn Janczak’s musical DNA actually lies in extremely dynamic driving electronica rhythms and techno beats so the Tidal house sound is first and foremost hugely dynamic, precise and stable, capable of instantaneous and vast energy swings and laden with an ever present dynamic pressure to even the very smallest of notes. But the fingerprint is a few grams rounded, gentle and delectably nuanced. Organic and fluid without a single bead of harshness or transistor-like staccato. Tidal keeps well away from the kind of ultra focused, biting, 50000 megapixel sound that many people imagine is high end. Instead you are presented with ever flowing liquid musicality. It exudes calmness and sophistication and possesses incredible harmonic ability and is shocking vivid in its portrayal or timbre and tonal structure. If someone asks me what neutrality is, this is what I play them. In Jorn’s own words, it’s a ‘pure glass of water’.

A Tidal system always pulls off two brilliant sonic miracles which mark it out as different from almost everything else in this industry. Firstly, their equipment offers the owner the very highest levels of retrieved information and detail ever witnessed – all seven veils are lifted – yet it miraculously it manages this without the typically unavoidable accompaniment of brightness, sterility, starkness or an overly analytical hifi sound. And the way it achives this naturalness and invisbility isn’t by rounding, smoothing, rolling off or abreviating. You can’t hear the equipment doing anything to avoid sounding sterlie or clinical, or even being in the way of the music at all.

Secondly, although solid state and either Class D or AB, a Tidal system sounds richer and more organic, more profoundly textured, more tonally insightful than a valve system yet it does this at the same time as being perfectly neutral and uncoloured and you are aware of that from the first moments of the first encounter. It achieves this not with vaccum tubes, or manipulating frequencies or adding in blur or bloom, but purely by posessing an incredibly low noise floor of the kind rarely achieved, thus allowing the absolute truth of the recording to come through. And the reality is, when you do this, the music already has all its richness and its harmonic saturation intact, it just take a design and engineering miracle to uncover it all. Other equipment will perform tricks to combat brightness and sterility and at the same time augment texture and tonal shading but you can of course always hear that, it’s the veryt definition of being coloured, of listening to the equipment rather than the music.

To live with day to day, this system is capable of breathtaking moments of expression and fine detail, profoundly emotive artistic communication and is just agonisingly beautiful and joyful to use. It is a £160,000 system which just a few years ago would have cost you £260,00 for a sound not quite as good. It really has no weaknesses, deficiencies or leanings to one genre or another, and like all Tidal it completely aces that feeling of nothingness, the sense that there is no equipment or anything electronic even in the room; nothing other than pure sumptuous music reformed in three dimensions exactly as it was recorded.

Tidal Contros/Intra/Piano G3: £56,000 + £29,500 + £58,000
Tidal PC192 x2/XLR128/SC128: £10,800 + £5600 + £7500
Melco S10 switch, Shunyata Omega Lan, £8000

System Price: £175,400

Suggested System with Contriva G3 loudspeakers.

Alterations / Upgrades

For bigger rooms and bigger budgets simply switch to the Tidal Contriva. Although similar actual sound quality and despite the new bass performance level of the G3 Piano, the Contriva is a different beast if it has the space to breathe. More weight, scale, depth and out and out macrodynamics. They are a no brainer if they are on the table as an option and only add £20,000 to the price.

For an additional £48,000, switch to the Ferios mono amplfiiers. A completely different level of bass control definition and response. Note though that the Intra is almost as transparent at less than half the money, testament to its Bugatti underpinings and incredible performance level for its price and size.

Tara Labs 0.8 or Muse (or beyond)  interconnects and speaker cables for an upgrade over the Tidal reference cables, or indeed Tidal Assoluta cables.

Although the Arkas does much to make feeds from Qobuz and Tidal truly special, the addition of an audiophile switch and high quality Hemingway or Shunyata ethernet cable will render streamed music even more natural and believable.

Stillpoints Ultra 5 with adapters or HifiStay Stella 100T under the speakers.