Antipodes’ New Oladra Serves a Perfect Sonic Dish

Antipodes’ new Oladra serves a perfect sonic dish…

Hailing from the Kapiti Coast of New Zealand, the new G4 edition of the Antipodes Oladra music server stands at the pinnacle of digital music storage and playback

London, England – For Absolute Sounds, the UK’s leading distributor of high-end audio equipment since 1978, the search for the finest music server money can buy has finally ended. The new G4 edition of the Oladra by Antipodes Audio – the latest addition to Absolute Sounds’ distribution portfolio – contains a host of proprietary technologies to store and play digital music in its cleanest, purest, most emotionally affecting form.

As well as a music server for local music storage, the Oladra – Antipodes’ top-tier model – is also a player/streamer (without onboard DAC) and reclocker. Launched in its original ‘G3’ form in 2023, it uses premium parts throughout and embodies Antipodes’ four-step approach, setting it apart from other music server solutions – the first step is optimised to run the server app, the second step is optimised to run the player app, the third step isolates and regenerates the output signal, and the last step reclocks the output signal that goes to the DAC.

The Oladra houses four separate customised processing engines – one for each step, each fully optimised for its specific task. This contrasts with the common approach for ‘audiophile’ music servers, which uses a single, standard computer and relies on a specialist I/O card to improve the digital signal fed to the DAC – this works to an extent but goes nowhere near as ‘deep’ as the Antipodes approach.

As Mark Jenkins, Antipodes’ CEO, says: “It is very easy to feed ones and zeroes to your DAC in the right order – any computer can do that. What is surprisingly difficult is to send those ones and zeros with perfect timing to the DAC.” Antipodes’ unique four-step approach achieves this to perfection, deliveringultra-precise data synchronisation and eliminating audible distortion.

The first three cascaded processing stages create a signal with high bandwidth and virtually zero noise below the bitrate, which ensures that the timing of binary data transitions is precisely defined. That is crucial to enabling the Oladra's ultra-stable clocking circuits to transmit a clean and precisely clocked signal to the connected DAC.

The new version of the Oladra, incorporating Antipodes’ latest G4 technologies, features double isolation from electronic noise (computers are inherently ‘noisy’ environments), regeneration and reclocking of all outputs: S/PDIF (RCA, BNC and optical), AES3 (three-pin XLR), I2S (HDMI and RJ45) and an entirely new, improved USB output.

Two custom-made motherboards utilise the latest generation of Intel chipsets, carefully selected and firmware-tuned in-house – this is crucial to Antipodes music servers’ superior sound – with 64GB of RAM and newly developed high-speed power supplies to maximise performance. Other benefits of the G4 model include an increase of 200 per cent to 400 per cent in system resources to improveresponsiveness, and enterprise-level resilience against data loss.

The Oladra can be user-configured with up to 24TB of internal storage via three SSD slots accessible on the backplate. Other specifications include native DSD512 and 32-bit/768kHz PCM hi-res audio support (even higher bitrates are achievable with some DACs), and 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet network connectivity. As with all Antipodes music servers, users can easily select and switch between Roon, Squeeze, Plex, MPD, HQPlayer, UPnP/DLNA and other popular playback solutions.

In addition to the Oladra, Absolute Sounds is also bringing the Antipodes Kala music server platform to the UK. Four different models suit all manner of system configurations, offering a choice of server/streamer or server only, alongside a variety of storage capacities, output specifications and performance levels.

Like the Oladra, the latest Kala models benefit from Antipodes’ G4 suite of technologies, the servers’ architecture allowing users to upgrade from one generation to the next. The Kala 50 server/streamer/reclocker tops the Kala line, second only to the Oladra in the Antipodes hierarchy, while the Kala 41 can be combined with the Kala 22 or Kala 21 to provide an upgrade path to the Kala 50’s performance level.

Discussing his decision to distribute Antipodes music servers in the UK, Ricardo Franassovici, Absolute Sounds’ founder and MD, said: “For a long time, we’d been searching for a music server that would fit seamlessly into our peerless portfolio of the world’s finest high-end audio brands. We’d heard several that were impressive in variousways, but none that matched the natural, organic, utterly absorbing sound quality of vinyl played on the most talented turntables from makers such as Döhmann, TechDAS and Thiele – a quality that completely connects you to the music on the deepest emotional level.

“That changed the moment I heard the Antipodes Oladra. Its sound is not only crisp, articulate and immediate, as one would expect from any high-end music server worth its salt, it is also endowed with richly saturated detail and an organic fluidity that makes other highly reputed music servers sound rather ‘mechanical’ and emotionally barren. Resolution and transparency are exceptional, but it’s the emotional connection with the music that sets Antipodes apart. It’s no exaggeration to say that hearing the Oladra for the first time was one of the most revelatory listening experiences I’ve had in years. 

“Of course, it’s the technology, design and materials inside Antipodes music servers that make the difference. They go further and deeper in eradicating the issues that restrict most music servers – which are essentially specialised computers – from reaching the heights of the very finest high-end audio sources. But Antipodes asks us not to focus on the technology but on the emotional effect of the music,the amplification of which is the technology’s sole purpose. How does listening to music served by an Oladra or Kala make you feel?

“As Antipodes’ CEO Mark Jenkins puts it: ‘Technology is just the tool and sound quality just the enabler. The sole purpose of music is your emotional reaction to it, and we share that purpose.”

Available in black or silver, the UK RRPs for G4 specification Antipodes music servers are as follows:

Antipodes Oladra: £28,888

Antipodes Kala 50: £18,888

Antipodes Kala 41: £9,998

Antipodes Kala 22: £8,998

Antipodes Kala 21: £6,998

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