Harman’s Mark Levinson has announced a major firmware update for its № 519 Audio Player which adds Roon Ready capability, MQA Certification and other enhancements.

The № 519 is now Roon Ready. Roon lets a user explore millions of tracks on TIDAL through the lens of the user’s collection. Roon is also a multi-room, multi-user networked audio platform, it offers features such as bit-perfect playback, DSD and PCM upsampling, multichannel support, and Signal Path display. Because the Nº 519 is Roon Ready, it requires no configuration to work with Roon; just connect it to your network.

The Mark Levinson No519 is now also certified with the MQA Full Decoder, which enables playback and authentication of MQA audio files and streams. The No 519 delivers full MQA playback while streaming MQA files from Tidal or Roon, playing through a USB drive, listening to an MQA-CD or via DLNA. MQA is an award-winning British technology capable of delivering the sound of the original master recording. The MQA file is fully authenticated and is small enough to stream or download. Additional enhancements include support for up to 8TB USB hard drives, support for Mac OS formatted hard drives, faster network discovery, an added Wi-Fi signal strength indicator and improved user experience with streaming services.

The № 519 was designed to be “the heart of high-performance audio systems”, with the ability to playback virtually any audio format from streaming music services including Spotify®, Tidal®, Qobuz® and others, to networked storage, to CD to high-resolution digital inputs and even convenient aptX® Bluetooth® wireless. The Mark Levinson № 519 offers high-resolution digital decoding up to 32-bit, 192kHz from PCM and double-speed DSD. Its Precision Link DAC features an ESS Sabre32 Reference converter. The № 519 contains a complete embedded Precision Stream Linux computer with 1GHz multicore processor.

It also features a proprietary Mark Levinson Pure Path discrete, direct coupled, fully balanced, dual-monaural signal path offering balanced and single-ended analogue outputs, balanced, optical and coaxial digital outputs and a high-performance Main Drive headphone output integrated into the front panel, enabling listeners to drive up to 32-ohm headphones in class A using the main output circuitry. Fixed or variable main outputs enable usage as a standalone music playback device connected directly to a power amplifier or active loudspeakers without the need for a separate preamp, and selectable high-pass filtering enables subwoofer integration. Like all Mark Levinson products, the № 519 is designed and made in the USA.

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