| Supported Audio File Formats | MP3, AAC, WMA, WMA-L, OGG, ALAC, OPUS |
| Supported High-Quality Audio File Formats | FLAC, MQA, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, MPEG-4 SLS |
| DSD Support | DSD256 |
| DAC | 2x ESS ES9039Q2M |
| Headphone Continuous Output Power (THD<0.1%) | 150 mW, 16 Ω / 235 mW, 32 Ω / 56 mW, 250 Ω / 23 mW, 600 Ω |
| App Controller Operating System | iOS, Android, Windows, macOS |
| Processor | ARM® Cortex™ -A53, Quad-Core, 1.8 GHz per core |
| 3rd-Party Integrations | AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Roon Ready, Dirac Live Ready |
| Control System Integrations | Crestron, Control4, RTI, ELAN, URC, Lutron, Josh.ai |
| Voice Control Integrations | Amazon, Alexa, Skills |
PRICE R22 990.00
SUPPLIED BY Cinema Imports (Pty) Ltd t/a AV Imports 082 571-6568
WEBSITE www.avimports.co.za
The Short Of It…
Solid build construction and impeccable finish that houses a simply awesome array of high quality technical wizardry. An extensive range of connections means that pretty much all setup scenarios are catered for. Musical performance, particularly through TIDAL, is beyond belief. No wonder that the ICON is described as the Flagship of the Node range. Add to the equation the extensive list of streaming services available, plus the always great to use BluOs, and you really can’t find fault with this incredible all-in-one package.
The Long Of It…
I’ve said it many times, but it should be said again. Audio is a slippery slope into financial oblivion. The moment you hear something being played through a new piece of equipment and you find yourself suddenly paying attention…it’s tickets for your wallet. Years ago I bought an entry-level portable DAC to listen to music on my Smartphone. I now have four of them in my bedside draw. As well as four headphones, one of which I ordered online in my sleep. I kid you not (tequila may have played a role). That was three years ago, and I still haven’t lived it down.
And so it was with my introduction to Bluesound (not the tequila making me order stuff in my sleep, of course), more specifically the NODE NANO, which I was given to review last year. I fell 
in love with it immediately, so much so that I ended up buying it. And I was quite content. Until I got my hands on the ICON for review. Oh, my. Be ready for a lengthy review, folks, there’s a lot to cover here…
If you take a look at the Stats panel above, it’s blatantly obvious that the company didn’t hold back on this streamer’s abilities. And what I’ve listed there is most likely only about a tenth of what the ICON actually has to offer. For the full list, go here and scroll down to the very bottom: https://www.bluesound.com/zz/node-icon#product-overview
But let’s start with the basics – the presentation. As I have mentioned before, I love the unboxing process. The way the product is presented is, in my mind, a way for the company to show their pride in what they are selling you. And here, Bluesound excels (as always). A sturdy box with the Bluesound logo on it, that even the roughest courier company would struggle to make any meaningful dent in, houses the ICON inside, covered in a protective white cloth, along with associated accessories and relevant documentation.
Hooking it up was blissfully easy, thanks mostly to my experience with the NANO. If not, I might well have wandered endlessly in the traumatising Desert of Technological Stupidity and Bad Decisions. Over the years I have travelled this road many times.
So, if you want to use the Icon’s onboard DAC (obviously recommended), you are going to use the Audio Out. However, if you feel that you have a DAC that is better than what the Icon offers, you have Coaxial Out. Using Balanced XLR Out is another recommended option.
Also available is Optical Out: connect one end to the Optical Out of the NODE ICON and the other end to the corresponding optical input of a compatible devices such as receivers, DACs or other digital processors. Again, remember that connecting via the Optical Out will also bypass the NODE ICON’s internal DAC.
An Optical In accepts signals from another device’s Optical Out.
Added to the offerings are Subwoofer Out to connect to an active subwoofer (or to a Bluesound subwoofer over the network), USB Input Type A for connecting mass storage devices (FAT32 or NTFS formatted), and a Type A USB Output that allows you to send digital audio to an external DAC.
Of particular interest, based on numerous mentions of it on various AV-related forums, is the HDMI eARC connection, which means that the ICON isn’t only useful for quality stereo set-ups, it’s also able to be an integral part of a home theatre set-up as well – a digital hub, so to speak. Simply connect an HDMI cable from the eARC input of the Icon to the ARC/eARC connection on your television/Blu-ray player, and away you go: high-resolution music streaming for your movie and gaming experiences is now available.
There’s also a 12 V trigger out, a Type C USB input to stream music from a Mac or PC, a LAN port for use with an Ethernet connection (more for convenience’s sake, since the preferred option is a good quality wireless connection), IR In and of course the AC mains connection. All in all, a very busy and versatile rear panel.
Whew. I think I’ve mentioned them all.
On the sides of the Icon, left and right, there are two 6.3 mm headphone jacks backed by THX AAA™ headphone amplifier technology, which Bluesound claims is capable of delivering the world’s most linear response. Interestingly enough, despite there being two jacks, Bluesound suggests using only one at a time, to get the best possible performance. More on my listening experiences a little later.
On top and in the front of anodised aluminium chassis with its gloss black finish are proximity-sensing buttons that allow you to change the volume, skip tracks or choose from any of the five programmable presets.
But the front is where the Icon really stands out from the other NODE streamers, thanks to a crystal clear, full colour 5-inch display that shows album art and track metadata. For me, personally, this was such a game-changer. Finally, gone were the days of using my portable DACs, watching the LED change colour, and then trying to remember whether Green was FLAC, MQA, MP3, ACC, etc! Now, all the relevant information could be seen and easily read.
Of course the status indicator has a bunch of different coloured lights, but from my experience with the NANO, so long as the light stayed Blue, I was content. Other colours indicate things such as updates available/updating, Hotspot working/not working, and so forth.
Inside the ICON is where all the audio magic happens, though.
The ICON’s internal (a bit surprising since quite a bit of attention was made about how the NANO’s power supply was outside the unit for less possible interference?) low-noise switched mode power supply powers a quad-core 1.8 GHz ARM Cortex A53 processor that controls everything, and still has enough juice left over to deal with Dirac Live (more on this later), while two ESS Sabre ES9039Q2M DACs are used in a dual mono configuration to ensure what you hear is pure perfection. Add to this Bluesound’s work with MQA Labs, which has continued to evolve to where we are now currently, with MQA’s QRONO d2a system. Here, it is specially adapted for the ESS DACs used, to correct timing errors. For more on why this is so vital for your listening pleasure, you can read Bluesound’s White Paper on it here: https://avnews.co.za/mqa-labs-digital-audio-with-an-analogue-soul-how-qrono-d2a-improves-digital-audio-playback/
I was recently introduced to a Facebook group called ‘MQA Experience’. There you’ll find myriad research papers and articles on MQA, DSP, neuroscience and other MQA-related topics. It’s quite the treasure trove, shows exactly why TIDAL is absolutely the best choice currently to stream your music, as well as why there’s still so much interest in what MQA Labs is up to. Not to mention that TIDAL still offers a good number of MQA tracks.
A brief note on Dirac. This is an optional upgrade from Dirac (from where you need to purchase a licence), 
used with a calibration kit and microphone that can be bought from Bluesound, and measures your room’s acoustics to eliminate standing waves, reverberations, and other unwanted distortions. I read up a few reviews from people who have used it, and general opinion seems to support its benefits.
Now, finally, to my experience with the ICON.
I connected it via the Audio Out to my PSB Alpha AM5 powered loudspeakers, queued a bunch of tracks on both Spotify and TIDAL, and sat back for some quality Me Time on the couch. I had been fortunate enough to get a demo of both the NANO and the ICON at AV Imports’ offices on a PSB/NAD system, and so already knew that there was a marked difference, but I hadn’t (obviously) as yet heard its performance in my less than perfect room, and through my own loudspeakers.
At the AV Imports demo, I also got introduced to two very different tracks, which have now been added to my reference tracks. One is The Curse by Agnes Obel, a soft, haunting track with a cello piece that leaves chills down your spine. The other rests completely, 199% on the other side of the musical spectrum – Ghost Rider’s Make Us Stronger, which if I had played it at volume on my setup, there’s a part in it that would have made me think that something awful had wrong with my speakers!
Other tracks I regularly use, each for a certain reason, include Muse’s Supermassive Black Hole, Eric Clapton’s My Father’s Eyes, Sheryl Crow and Sting on Always On Your Side, Pink Floyd’s High Hopes, as well as a number of Mike Oldfield tracks. To get some good orchestral scores, Hans Zimmer for the win!
Now I stand by every positive comment I made about the NODE NANO, still maintain that it was the best investment I’ve made in years for my listening pleasure, and that you can’t go wrong with its performance as a streamer.
But with the ICON being close on three times the NANO’s purchase price, it would be unrealistic to expect not to hear a difference.
I’ve no idea whether it’s the processor, the twin DACs, the MQA encoder, or all of them together, but my experience was an immediate perception, in particular, of a soundstage that was wider, more detailed. Without the benefit of the immediate comparison I experienced at AV Imports, I could be forgiven for wondering if my experience was because at this price point it simply had to sound better?
However, I’m pretty certain that my time at AV Magazine gave me enough experience to be able to ignore the price tag when evaluating the performance of a review product. Regardless of the price tag, a product is either worth the cost or not. And the Icon is worth every cent of its asking price, based on my experience with it.
Now the comments I made above about the soundstage and detail, was with my PSBs, which are incredibly accurate loudspeakers, and the better the source, the better they deliver on all sonic fronts. As with the NANO, the ICON managed to open their performance even further, with incredible clarity, and I loved every second listening to them. I found myself extending the listening session constantly, searching out other tracks that I’ve always enjoyed (even if they weren’t quite what you’d describe as reference tracks… ). Think along the lines of some Ava Max, or Avicii.
There was quite simply so much more presence to the music, regardless of music format, that you never reached listening fatigue – treble was clear, never overly-bright or shrill, midrange was exactly how it should be, tight and punchy, and the low frequencies growled, but never at the expense of the other frequencies.
However, and I have to clarify that this is my personal experience with my set-up (which in the grand scheme of Hi-Fi Things is very basic), and as much as listening through my loudspeakers was awesome, it’s the headphone delivery that really knocked off the proverbial socks. But with a good supporting system, your experience is pretty much guaranteed to be the opposite to mine. I’m thinking in particular of the PSB T20 floorstanders I reviewed about a year ago, powered by the NAD C 700 streaming amp. Man, what a package that was. And the demo at AV Imports was done with the next version of the PSBs, the PSB IMAGINE T65 Tower speakers, which I hate to admit, but my PSB AM5s are certainly not in the same league.
I’ve used headphones for my listening sessions for years, purely because as a father of a music-loving 5-year old, any attempt at playing music on the loudspeakers ends in endless requests for her playlist, and an unimpressed mother who is trying to get her to go to sleep. As mentioned at the start of the review, I’ve had a number of portable DACs for review, at least one of them that is also THX AAA-certified – so possibly this is the actual reason I tend to favour the headphone experience – it’s where I’m most comfortable identifying the good from the bad, the exceptional from the mediocre.
For testing, I had quite the range to choose from: Sennheiser HD 200 Pros, AKG K 240 Mk IIs, the SONOS Ace, and the utterly awesome Bang & Olufsen Beoplay HX headphones.
The Sennheisers are very neutral, almost clinical to the point that sometimes you’re tempted to tweak with the EQ settings on the relevant DAC to give the music a tad more ‘flavour’. The AKGs have been notoriously difficult to get the maximum experience out of them from the portable DACs, clearly needing more oomph from the amplifier section. The SONOS Ace headphones are naturally warm and clear, and the B&Os … well, it’s B&O. Enough said, I guess.
The Sennheisers and AKGs were tested with a wired connection, the SONOS Ace both wired and via Bluetooth, while the B&Os could only be tested through Bluetooth, as no 6.3 mm adapter is supplied with them.
I know. Really?
The Sennheisers immediately showed more warmth (not everyone may like the change, but…), the AKGs, which can at times lean towards too much bass on lesser systems, tightened up to give a good solid punch where needed, particularly in the midrange. The SONOS Ace were as expected, simply astounding, wired as well as via Bluetooth, while the B&Os were a perfect example of how far we have come in Bluetooth technology. It’s honestly getting more and more hard to pick up valid differences between Bluetooth and a wired connection. The quality of the music from the latter two sets of headphones, the clarity, was quite simply in another league completely. I think the other two sets felt embarrassed in their company… You could listen for hours, I think.
Possibly it’s the selfishness of listening alone in your own capsule of solitude that gives you the ability to block out every possible outside noise, to leave you truly alone with the music, that allows you to really experience what is there. Whatever the case, I spent a good amount of time with the headphones, and on all the tracks I listened to, there were honestly parts where I knew I was hearing something that wasn’t there before, be it an echo, a slightly more clear drum kick, a longer fade to a guitar pluck, a deeper bass to a cello (The Curse). There was quite simply more detail on most tracks than I had ever heard before.
The downside to headphone listening is that on a poorly compressed tracks (Spotify only), you can really pick it up easily, and you feel let down, especially if it’s a favourite track. The music is less open, less detailed, and you abruptly understand the true meaning of ‘compression’.
The ICON is not a magic wand for bad recordings, and you wouldn’t want it to be one, because that would mean interfering in what has been mastered/recorded, and introducing any number of filters to try and make it better. There might well be other streamers that do such, but I feel that the ICON is there to help make the most of the best streaming, high quality tracks that are out there, and to deliver that audio nirvana straight to your ears, impeccably, whether through headphones or loudspeakers.
Whatever your setup, whatever your listening choices, the NODE ICON is guaranteed to be your best companion. But don’t take my word for it, take a look at the awards below that it’s already won.
Andrew Rowland
