If you have a client who is aesthetically-conscious, the Stream 1 from Cabasse offers an appealing solution to wireless audio streaming.

Cabasse is brand primarily of loudspeakers from France. Its line-up includes the astonishing fifth of a million dollar Cabasse La Sphére active speakers. It has a particular leaning to coaxial drivers. When you mount the tweeter at the centre of the midrange, the sound is coming closer to the ideal of a ‘point source’.

The Stream 1 uses this idea in a quite unusual audio streaming application.

What is it?
Essentially, the Stream 1 is a reasonably compact, high quality loudspeaker for streaming digital music. It supports input from Bluetooth (with the higher quality aptX codec supported), network storage via DLNA (wired or wireless), plugged-in USB media and even a little content from the internet.

This is mixed down to mono and then amplified into the three drivers. Treble and midrange are handled by a coaxial 29mm tweeter and 80mm midrange driver, each scoring 10W of power. Bass is delivered by a 170mm woofer, downwards firing. This is equipped with two voice coils and each of these gets its own 20W amplifier.

The enclosure has a couple of small bass reflex ports at the rear. All the wiring, including power, is also there at the rear and is largely hidden from view.

The unit is shaped like a large flattened egg – really, it’s best if you refer to the pictures – with the midrange and tweeter under a cloth grille on one flat side and the woofer on the other. The sort of natural way of placing the thing is down flat, but you can stand it up on the back section (if you’re using a USB drive it will need to be fairly short in this case) or mount it vertically on a wall. Slots are provided on the rear/underside for that purpose.

There are four control keys on the body of the unit: volume up and down, input, and standby on/off. A small remote – shaped rather like the main unit – replicates those and adds a few more keys: mute, play/pause, and skip/fast forwards and reverse. But, really, if you want to get the best out of this unit you need an iOS or Android phone or tablet. It is through this that you can select tracks to play by name, set up playlists and access Internet content.

Setting Up
For basic use, all you have to do is plug the unit in, plug in an analogue audio device or pair with a Bluetooth source, switch the input appropriately and start playback. But that’d be a waste because the unit comes into its own with a network connection.

You can go wired or wireless. No setup is required in the former case: just plug it in. For wireless there are three options. The simplest is via WPS if supported by your wireless router. Press the button on the back of the Cabasse and the WPS button your router, and after a minute or so the networks is set up. The manual method is pretty clever: the Cabasse sets up its own temporary wireless network. You connect to it using a web browser and make the necessary settings via a HTML interface.

And, of course, you should install the relevant control app on your Android or iOS device.

Control
As you’d expect, the Cabasse Streamer apps are free from their respective Android and Apple stores. They took me a little while to get used to, primarily because I was imposing my own assumptions on them.

The trick was simple: you touch a title (album, artist, etc) to navigate to its contents, and press the ‘+’ sign at the end if you want to do something to it or with it.

There are three tabs across the top. The right-most one is settings (basically, device selection); the middle one is the control panel for whatever is playing; the left one is where you choose what to play.

That last one is important. A horizontal line of sources is shown just under the tabs: ‘My Playlists’, ‘Local Music’, any DNLA servers on your network, and ‘Stream 1’ – the device itself. Playlists can be set up from any of the music sources. Indeed, a playlist can contain songs from multiple sources.

Local Music is the audio residing on the device you’re running the app on.

The Cabasse Streamer apps are free from their respective Android and Apple stores.

If you select ‘Stream 1’ they you can use the stuff it directly accesses. There are three items there: any USB drive that is plugged in and two Internet applications. One is the popular and extensive vTuner, which provides access to tens of thousands of radio stations all over the world. Unlike most implementations you don’t seem to be able to register the unit and manage your favourites via the web. However once you find the station or podcast that you like, you can just add it to a playlist, making it really easy to get back. Also available is ‘Deezer’ a music streaming app. This requires registration, but is free (with advertisements). You can upgrade to a premium Deezer service which sheds the ads.

There were some flaky aspects to the apps. Because I was using two separate devices I often wanted to close down the app completely on one so I could use the other. The Android one just wouldn’t close down. It hung at the confirmation stage, and eventually Android would step in, tell me the app was unresponsive and offer to close it down.

As it happens, later in my explorations I found that I could control the unit with both tablets running at the same time, but after a while the iPad one got confused and I had to reboot the iPad to get it working properly again. Change something with one of the apps and the other will shortly update to reflect the change.

Initially the app took a weird dislike to the song Angie by The Rolling Stones. It would not display the cover art on either platform, on either of the two versions I had of the song I had on my network attached storage: a 24 bit, 96kHz rendition taken from the GRRR! Blu-ray or the 16 bit 44.1kHz version from the Goat’s Head Soup CD. All the other songs from both discs were fine. The tags looked fine as well, when I inspected them with a tag editor. In the end I recopied the files from my computer to the NAS and the problem went away.

Sound
With all that music on tap you’d have to hope it sounded good. So the first question to ask is: why mono?

Answer: it may as well be. A small unit can offer usable stereo if you sit close to it, but this device is designed to offer effective room-filling, although far from thunderous, sound. You’re highly unlikely to be sitting in the tiny sweet spot in which stereo might be effective from a very narrow speaker spread.

I certainly wasn’t, and it sounded fine. I did most of my listening to FLAC files from a network attached server, initially via a WiFi connection, but later wired.

With WiFi I was able to stand the unit up on its narrow rear so that the mid and treble frequencies projected out into the room. With the Ethernet cable plugged in there wasn’t really enough room for the unit to stand up, but I preferred the sound with it flat anyway. Placed vertically, the treble was a bit forward, especially the upper treble in the realms of cymbals and such. Flat, a better balance was achieved and because much of the high frequency content was directed up at the ceiling there was a kind of airy sense to the sound.

Cabasse’s specifications said the unit was good for audio in MP3, WMA and AAC lossy formats, and for lossless in PCM, ALAC (Apple Lossless) and FLAC. Oddly, for the latter three, it specified supported resolutions as being 44.1kHz at 16 bits, and 44.1kHz, 48kHz and 96kHz at 24 bits. I was a bit worried by some apparent omissions: 48kHz 16 bits, for example, and 88.2kHz 24 bits.

Happily, both of those worked fine. I also tried 24/192 FLAC, and surprisingly it sort of worked, in a very strange way. Apparently the system interpreted it as being 24/96, and so just ran it at half speed, half pitch.

At higher volume levels the unit was mostly well behaved. When turned up very loud, the opening strains of the Deodato version of ‘Nights in White Satin’ hit a couple of powerful bass notes that induced a rattle when the unit was flat, but not upright. That aside, it was a pleasure to listen to: clean and clear.

The bass was musical and reasonably full, although necessarily constrained in reach by the limits of the unit’s enclosure.

But not as constrained as you might think. The bass balance certainly sounded fine, and it extended down to a touch under 50Hz without any reduction in output. Even below that there was a 10dB step down to further output (presumably furnished by the bass reflex ports) that extended flatly from 44 down to 32Hz. Astonishing, really.

There is one quite unfortunate design decision with the system, and it had me worried for some minutes, as no doubt it would some purchasers. In short: when I plugged it in the first time the system just didn’t work. I tried switching it on and off, unplugging, examining the manual, but all that happened was that the indicator on top of the unit just continued flashing white, slowly. I was on the phone to call the distributor for help when, suddenly, the slowly flashing white light stopped and was replaced by a steady red one. I pressed the power key and away she went!

Later it did another firmware upgrade, but this time announced it in a computery female voice so there was less confusion, if a slight start at this unexpected intruder. That one took about five minutes.

Later I discovered a note in the manual to the effect that the unit updates its firmware automatically when connected to your network. The time for this, says the manual, ‘can vary from 5 minutes to half an hour’. It also warned against switching off during the process, but happily the unit survived my interventions.

This is poor design. The user should always have the opportunity to say ‘No’. Aside from moments of despair when you think your brand new high-end audio system is broken, what happens if you bring a friend home to show the unit to and it just won’t work? Or you’re dying to catch the 7pm news from your favourite Internet radio station and when you switch on the unit it goes incommunicado in network update limbo?

Cabasse should change this.

(Ed note: Cabasse has advised that the next firmware upgrade will remove the auto upgrade and replace it with a notification on the app.)

Conclusion
That wrinkle aside, the Cabasse Stream 1 proved to be a highly controllable, fine sounding, compact wireless audio system. It looks good and especially suits the networked home.