Blue Smoke Entertainment Systems

Read about The Black Box™ at CES 2009:

Robert Harley of Absolute Sound was "completely blown away" and named our exhibition (with Rockport, Ypisilon, MSB and HRS) one of the "Best of CES 2009". Read about it.

The SoundStage! Network was also impressed and recognized us as one of the Standout Demos at CES 2009. "Not only did this system image like crazy, but you could almost sense the performer's fingers flying over the guitar's frets as the notes flew by. The resolution was astonishing." Read more.

Welcome to Blue Smoke Entertainment Systems.

In developing The Black Box™, we set out to meet one goal: to design and deliver the very best-sounding no-compromise digital music source for the discerning audiophile.

Like many others, we quickly determined that the music server (i.e. computer-based music system) would offer the best platform to achieve this lofty goal.

As we looked around, we saw many noteworthy products. There were servers with extremely impressive user interfaces, great marketing, and above-average audio quality. Such products seemed to offer considerable lifestyle appeal, but failed to elevate sonic performance to true "audiphile" standards.

Then, there were companies offering customizable, PC-based, music servers where customers could "build" their own products in a way many of us do when purchasing a home or office computer. We liked the open architecture of this latter group for a number of reasons. First was flexibility; users weren't limited to the software and hardware sold exclusively by the manufacturer. The advantage here was that users didn't pay a premium for proprietary add-ons (data storage, touchscreens) and could shop for these accessories anywhere. Addtionally, open-architecture systems lend themselves to many affordable third-party software applications written for the operating system. And, while the audio quality of some of these PC-based systems can be quite good, we at Blue Smoke found that they were not able to push the sonic performance envelope quite as far as we hoped to.

Excited by the advantages of both approaches, we decided that The Black Box™ would incorporate the best aspects of both approaches, while adding audio performance and features not found in either. We like to call The Black Box™ a "custom hybrid audiophile PC".

While offering some proprietary software aimed purely for ease-of-use, The Black Box™ has - at its core - a handful of proprietary hardware and software elements which are SOLELY for the purpose of sonic performance. At the same time, we have allowed The Black Box™ to remain an "open" system so users have highly individualized functionality and access to cost-effective accessories.

When you experience The Black Box™, we believe you'll agree that its sonic performance and features put it in a new class of music source. Learn more about The Black Box™.