iFi Audio Retro Aurora Music System

Our designer, Julien Haziza, drew inspiration from Japanese industrial designers and architecture – namely Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando and the Omotesandō and Harajuku districts in Tokyo.

Clad in bamboo and elevated by a distinctive aluminum frame, Aurora’s design is striking. It mimics the grand scale of Japanese architecture – crisp, clean lines intertwined with a hint of vintage. Very fitting for the tour de force that is the Aurora.

Aurora is driven by PureEmotion®, an ingenious fusion of amp technologies – brand new and original to WiFi. It delivers a sound that combines purity of tone with a high level of engagement, speed and dynamic gusto, ensuring the emotive quality of music is delivered in full effect – which is why we call it PureEmotion®.

Many audio products use digital signal processing (DSP) to deliver a big, spacious sound from a single box. This is an artificial, lossy process that detracts from the sound quality. The clever technologies in the Aurora (and all iFI products), avoid this completely as they operate in the analog domain.

SoundSpace® delivers a room-filling sound and gives music a sense of scale and space you wouldn’t expect from an all-in-one system.

TrueBass® delivers genuine bass with depth and definition. Everything from timpani to a bass guitar is conveyed with power and poise.

With Auto Room Tailoring (ART)®, the Aurora can auto-configure the speaker array according to its position in the room. The effect is similar to the adjustments made by a sound engineer at a live venue.

And what makes ART® special is that it’s executed in the analog domain. Forget tinny and imagine the deep, voluminous sound that captivates you.

And what makes ART® special is that it’s executed in the analog domain. Forget tinny and imagine the deep, voluminous sound that captivates you.

Aided by ART®, the Aurora adapts to the way you want to use it. Place it under a TV, connect via Bluetooth® or optical cable and use it as a stylish soundbar. And stream your favorite music. Link several Auroras via Wi-Fi to create a multi-room system, playing in-sync or individually. Whether you stream from Spotify or Tidal, or surf the infinite number of internet radio stations via TuneIn, the Aurora has your music needs covered.

Discrete ESS Sabre Hyperstream DAC chipset with time-domain jitter eliminator, discrete oscillator, and 112dB dynamic range for discerning listeners.

Aurora uses Bluetooth5.0® — the very latest version with the newest Qualcomm 5100 series chipset. There’s also the super-smooth ESS Sabre DAC chip.

All current and future Bluetooth® audio formats are supported including aptX and aptX HD, aptX Low Latency, aptX Adaptive, LDAC, and HWA/LHDC, hi-res Bluetooth® codecs created by Sony and Huawei respectively. Also, we have Apple’s favored format, AAC.

Every codec is covered at the highest resolution Bluetooth® specification.

PureEmotion® is our proprietary amp technology. It is a hybrid circuit design that comprises several key stages. The first of these – the preamp stage – incorporates a Russian 6N3P valve (visible through a window next to the OLED display). This takes the analog audio signal delivered by the Aurora’s DAC circuitry – based around a chip from ESS Technology’s renowned 32-bit Sabre DAC family – and adds gain in preparation for further amplification, imbuing the sound with pure tonality, open imaging, and natural fluidity.

The Russian 6N3P is from the 2C51 premium tube/valve family. Each half of the tube is used as the pre-amplifier stage for the left & right channels. The 6N3P brings the beauty, life-like sound of tubes into play – unusual for a one-box music system.

The drive unit array with a proprietary matrix, adjusts the level of output from specific drivers at certain frequencies. It gives the Aurora an immersive, room-filling performance, enabling the soundstage to extend beyond the single cabinet. Music has a sense of scale and space you simply wouldn’t expect from an all-in-one music system.

ART (Automatic Room Tailoring) is a ‘room correction’ system developed entirely in-house.

At the press of a button, six sensors measure the distance to the surrounding walls using ultrasonic sound. Then, a 32-bit ARM Cortex microprocessor adjusts the output from the speaker array to precisely tailor the musical performance.

All the adjustments are made strictly in the analog domain, without relying on DSP or feedback in the manner of many other room correction systems. The result is stunning realism ‘live’ as if you were at the concert.

With LINKPLAY™ WiFi/network playback, built-in Spotify and Tidal, and wide protocol support for 32-Bit/192kHz. Aurora can be also used without a computer to stream audio directly.

The iFi Bluetooth® implementation does not use a standard SOC (System On a Chip) as seen elsewhere. It uses a combination of quality elements to extract the most from each stage. The Qualcomm chip routes the raw, digital Bluetooth® signal to a specialized Sabre DAC chip to convert the signal from digital to analog – any jitter is eliminated using our GMT Femto-precision clock system to deliver Bluetooth® that is a cut above.