Product Description
The Entreq Empire is a one box solution with battery power, network switch and dedicated audio cables for DC and network.
This solves many of the weak links in some network setups. But also batteries have their problems to deal with. A battery sends out EMI and RF which could be very negative for the sound quality. They are also sensitive for vibrations. We have experience from this kind of problem and have several products like Athena racks, AC Wraps, cables and all our ground boxes to reduce just this kind of problem. We have put a lot of effort and all our knowledge in Empire to minimise the the problems caused by radiation and vibrations.
The capacity is 20,000 mah and max out 4.3 amps. This is by far enough for drive a Roon Nuc core even when use DSP and is by far is enough for all routers on market. The battery has a power save function that turns off if no power is used after 30 seconds. The Entreq Empire is delivered with a charger for the battery. You can let the charger be connected all time and it will regulate the charge automatically.
The Entreq Empire is available in three different levels:
Primer Pro
Apollo
Olympus
The Empire includes a DC cable terminated with a 5.5mm OD 2.1mmID connector plus an array of adaptors. By request we can supply with a different terminated DC plug size (but with no adaptor set).
Only few years ago streaming music was most for background music. The quality has improved a lot and today is comparable to CD or in fact even better.
We all know that no chain is stronger than the weakest link, but very little effort has been spent on the fact that we need routers, switches, power supplies, DC power cables, and network cables in the chain. These parts are often neglected since all focus has been spent on the core, endpoints and DACs. And if we ignore these smaller details, the result will never be as good as it can be.
First of all, you need a good router. That is priority one. The routers you been provide from your internet distributor is mostly of weak quality. If you want good quality on your sound you need to replace that router with a high-quality router. We use to recommend ASUS routers for two reasons. They use 19 V DC for power.They are easy setup and are reliable.
And once you get a good router you also get the first reason to use Entreq Empire. Because your router will be delivered with a switched power supply. The good thing with those are that they are cheap, easy to handle and use very little power. The negatives with them are that they most often have no ground connection and they send out a lot of high frequency pollution on the power side that not only affects the device it feeds, but also the power network so other units in your system get “dirty power”. So we think, by replacing the switched power supplies to Empire will result in a big jump in performance.
The next step for improvement is adding a good switch. I for very long time thought that the solution that will offer best sound was to feed the streamer straight from the router. This was totally wrong. We know for sure that the wrong switch can harm the sound but now also understand that right switch improves the sound dramatically.
A good switch refreshes and separates the signal from the rest of the network and the sound improves a lot. The Entreq Empire uses a dedicated switch with 1 fixed dedicated audio RG 45 cable and has 3 ports for connecting to your streamer with cables you choose, depending on what length you need and what quality.
On the part of the network you use for music streaming you also need good network cables and switches that do not colour your sound. If for some reason you don’t want to buy dedicated audio RG 45 cables for your system we recommend you to use unshielded CAT 5 cables. Please don’t use shielded CAT 6 or CAT 7 cables, because it will most often not improve anything, but instead can cause you problems when shielded cables meet unshielded.
