Antipodes Audio Oladra Music Server

By: Alan Sircom [hi-fi+ Issue 239]

Do you remember the scene from The Shining in which the late Shelley Duvall discovers the “All Work and No Play” contents of Jack Nicholson’s ‘novel’? My listening notes for the Antipodes Audio Oladra music server were a little like those typed pages, constantly returning to one phrase: It’s about time!

As the name suggests, Antipodes Audio is from the other side of the planet: Otaki on the North Island of New Zealand, ¯ some 45 miles from the capital, Wellington. Antipodes Audio is an overnight sensation in the high-end audio world. And, as with any overnight sensation, that’s based on more than 20 years of hard work. The brand has been working on computer audio since 2009 and made its first commercially available server two years later. It also operates a highend distribution agency – Emotion Audio – and an on-site demonstration facility. This is not simply a side hustle for a manufacturer but means Antipodes Audio is constantly exposed to the crucible of real-world listeners and is not walled up in an ivory tower.

Two houses…

Forgive the skewering of English grammar, but the Oladra is Antipodes Audio’s flagship servers. The singular/plural clash is deliberate because the Oladra is two music server-side products in one elegant box. The machined alloy case houses a server computer and a player computer. Chassis aside, these computers share little more than a power inlet. Both run on a Linux computer platform but with custom code for their task. This means the Antipodes Audio Oladra performs its server duties fast and reliably while the player presents the rest of your system with the best possible music source.

While ‘music server’ is not a high-pressure activity for a computer (compared to, say, an enterprise-grade device that might receive thousands of file requests every second), it is a specialist one. Separating tasks this way takes some heavy lifting from the player section, moving the needle from ‘worrying about the occasional drop-out’ to ‘maximising sonic performance’.

“Nice idea,” says the cynic, “but couldn’t this be done cheaper with just two computers?” Antipodes Audio has a Kala K41 Server and K21 player that does just that. But that’s the subject of a later review