Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport – The new offspring from Florence

The new Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport is a solution that is dedicated to a single task, namely to deliver the maximum quality in music streaming, nothing more and nothing less, according to the description of the Italian development team of Volumio srl. With this solution, the Florence-based company presents a product that can be used in combination with an external D/A converter or an audio system with an integrated D/A converter, such as an amplifier or active loudspeaker systems.

Volumio srl – From hobby to highly specialised software forge

The company Volumio srl was founded in 2015 and is considered a proven specialist for streaming solutions, whereby the focus is of course on the specially developed streaming platform Volumio OS. However, the roots actually go back to 2013, when the software in question was developed as a hobby.

In 218, the company from Florence presented the freemium platform MyVolumio, which ensured in particular that it could reach a broader customer base and establish an impeccable reputation as a proven expert in the field of streaming solutions. Up to this point, the company had been supplying the Volumio OS software as an OEM, primarily to third-party suppliers who used it for their hardware solutions. In the same year, however, the company presented the first independent hardware solution based on Volumio OS, namely the Volumio Primo.

Currently, of course, the focus is still on the Volumio OS platform itself, which is partly offered by the company itself, but is also made available to third-party manufacturers. In addition, the company now offers three hardware solutions of its own, including the Volumio Primo Music Network Player and Streamer mentioned above, which has long been available in a new version. The Volumio Integro Integrated Network Amplifier is a new all-in-one solution and the Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport is another innovation.

Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport – A Pure Streaming Transport

The special feature of the new Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport is, of course, that it is not a streaming client, as the name suggests, but rather a so-called streaming transport. This solution does not have an integrated D/A converter, so it is entirely dedicated to streaming alone and leaves the signal conversion to external components.

New Design Line

The Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport naturally presents itself in the new design line recently introduced by Volumio srl, which was conceived by Design Narratives Ltd. and looks more elegant than the original very sober design of the hardware components from Florence.

The flat housing in grey aluminium with rounded edges has a light blue front, with a bright red button with status LED in the centre. This is the only control element.

With its compact dimensions, the Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport fits easily into any audio system, even if you use active speakers alone, you can easily place the small one next to it.

The power supply is provided by an external 5 V 3 A plug-in power supply unit.

Powerful platform as a basis

At the heart of the Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport is a 1.9 GHz Amlogic S905D3 quad-core processor, which is supported by 2 GBytes of DDR4 RAM and equipped with 16 GBytes of memory.

Integration into the network is either via cable and an RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet interface, or via the WiFi module, which complies with the IEEE 802.11ac standard and features 2×2 MIMO with RSDB.

The Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport also has Bluetooth 5.0 and is equipped with two USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 port, as well as a MicroSD card slot for direct connection of storage media and a CD drive.

The special feature of the Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport is said to be that the circuitry has been especially designed for optimal signal processing; “engineering made simple” is the manufacturer’s philosophy here.

The circuit is designed in such a way that the shortest possible signal paths form the basis and all digital outputs have galvanic isolation, so that clean signals can always be output to a D/A converter free of sound-damaging interference.

The power supply, which is designed separately for each component, especially for the internal clock of the Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport, also contributes to this.

Numerous digital interfaces

In order to connect to an audio system on a digital level, the new Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport offers first and foremost a USB 2.0 port to which a corresponding D/A converter can be connected. There is also an AES/EBU interface as well as an optical and coaxial S/PDIF interface on the back of the device. An HDMI connection is also available here, whereby this is used to connect the Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport to a TV and to achieve a particularly appealing, generous display of the user interface but also videos. This corresponds to HDMI 2.1 and thus supports HDCP 2.2 as well as content up to 4K with 60 fps.

Of course, Volumio OS is used as the operating system, whereby the manufacturer naturally relies on the latest version Volumio OS 3.

Volumio OS as a flexible platform

Volumio OS offers a wide range of possibilities, first and foremost the playback of own content from the network, using UPnP with Open Home support. The Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport is thus a dlna-certified streaming transport.

The Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport also supports Apple AirPlay via Shairport Sync and is equipped for TIDAL with TIDAL Connect and Spotify via Spotify Connect. Qobuz is also directly supported and the platforms YouTube, Radio Paradise, Pandora, Soundcloud, Mixcloud and others can be integrated via plug-ins.

A particularly exciting plug-in is the one that turns the Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport into a so-called Roon Bridge, which enables it to be directly integrated into the media management and hi-res audio multi-room streaming software from Roon Labs LLC. The manufacturer thus speaks of a Roon-ready streaming solution.

It should also be mentioned that the Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport supports all relevant data formats, starting with MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis up to ALAC, FLAC, AIFF and WAV, whereby content in DSD is also supported.

The actual resolution depends, of course, on the D/A converters used, but with Linear PCM this ranges up to 32 bits and 768 kHz as well as DSD512 via USB. All other digital interfaces of the Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport output Linear PCM with up to 24 bit and 192 kHz.

Volumio app for simple control

Of course, this solution must not be without a suitable app, which is available in the form of the Volumio App for Apple iOS and Google Android. It can be used to control not only the Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport itself, but also other solutions based on Volumio OS in the same network.

Prices and availability

The new Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport should be available in specialist shops within the next few days. The manufacturer itself also offers it directly via its website at a price of € 989,-.

Getting to the point

The new Volumio Rivo Music Player Transport offers maximum performance in audio streaming. It is a pure streaming transport, which leaves the actual signal conversion to external specialists and concentrates on the essentials, namely to play back the music exactly as the artist intended, according to the promise of the Italian company Volumio srl.