First Look (And Listen) – The New Bluesound NODE!

When summer finally comes around up here in the North, all thoughts turn to leisure, social events, and escaping the city by whatever means. It’s not the ideal time to launch a new audio product. But in these upside down times, launches are often delayed by several months. And that happened here, with Bluesound’s new line of gear. So around comes June, and we have a new Node and Powernode. The third revision to Bluesound’s ever popular streaming DAC is named, simply, NODE. On your sales receipt it may say NODE N130, but for all practical purposes, it’s just NODE. Pretty straightforward. NODE of course replaces the best selling and highly regarded Node 2i, a tall order – the Node 2i was considered an entry-level-great streamer, with MQA. So how did they do? I’ve spent the last two weeks playing with the new NODE: I think they’ve pretty much nailed it. Again.   Changes Visually – not a big change; you still can’t and won’t mistake this for anything else. Smart to retain the visual identity of a popular product. The packaging is also basically identical..no point making unboxing videos for this one. So, the same shape and footprint, and [...]