Jordan O'BrienSteinway & Sons is mostly known for its extremely high-end and prestigious pianos, but thanks to a partnership with Danish professional audio system company Lyngdorf, the company is bringing its expertise of sound to the digital audio space.
The company’s partnered in 2007 and launched the Steinway Lyngdorf Model D with a price tag in excess of £100,000. Now Steinway Lyngdorf is back with its latest product – the Model P200 surround sound processor.
To live up to its credentials, Steinway Lyngdorf has equipped the Model P200 with some of the latest technology; including RoomPerfect and fully digital signal processing.
RoomPerfect has previously been used on Steinway’s Model P1 and claims to offer ‘the world’s most sophisticated technology for adapting the sound system to the environment’.
Using RoomPerfect, installers will be able to install the Model P200 in any room they see fit – living rooms, media rooms or home theatres – with virtually no need to design the room acoustics around the sound system.
The Model P200 has been reserved for that special, high-end project – offering up to 256 output channels, full support for 3D surround audio formats Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and Auro-3D.
Through its advanced HDMI switching capabilities, the Model P200 can handle up to five separate 4K video streams simultaneously, allowing routing from any HDMI input to any output with unique On Screen Display for each stream.
It can also show four inputs on one screen (tiling) or split one input to be shown on four screens as one video wall.
While Steinway & Sons is famous for its traditional, hand-crafted, high-end pianos, the Model P200 is 100% digital without sound-deteriorating digital-to-analogue conversions.
Some will argue that the beauty of analogue sound systems is the imperfections in the audio but Steinway Lyngdorf believes that the beauty of its 100% digital solution is the capability of delivering the purest sound possible – the Model P200 processor is designed to ensure sound is replayed completely intact.
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Die-hard movie fans will also appreciate Steinway’s offering of an optional upgrade with a 16-channel DCI-compliant digital AES/EBU input for integration with digital cinema servers.
HDBaseT and multiple control options including RS232, remote web interface, IP-control, and ihiji are included as standard.
According to Steinway Lyngdorf all these features help the system ‘deliver digital high-definition surround experiences that the world has never heard’.
The Model P200 will be quite the investment however – as installers will need to take into account the fact that it will only support amplifiers and speaker from Steinway Lyngdorf.
While some installers will prefer to mix and match, the company believes that this restriction is in the best interest of the end-user, justifying the limitation by claiming that the Steinway & Sons partnership cannot be attained with a mix of ‘off the shelf’ products from different manufacturers.
“No chain is stronger than the weakest link and the full system approach ensures high efficiency in every aspect,” reads a press release on the matter.
The Model P200 is shipping now and will be available exclusively in anodised matte black and glass.
The MSRP of Steinway Lyngdorf’s latest product is $18,000 USD (~£12,000).