Both companies were significant players in hi-fi streamer market and their disappearance may bring considerable frustration to the customers who have bought their streaming products.
It is unknown what cause Cocktail Audio, or to be more precise its mother company Novatron of Korea, to cease operations, but their range of relatively inexpensive music servers-streamers was recently augmented with much more expensive elite products and that was not met positively by their core customer base, it seems. The bad news is that Cocktail Audio streamer firmware is slowly becoming obsolete and most streaming functions will die out eventually, leaving the customer with just a file player. Sad truth of a rapidly evolving world of streaming APIs…
Auralic, a Hong Kong based company, used to make fairly expensive and sophisticated DACs, streamers and sync clocks, or in another words, component digital front ends. Citing US import tariffs as a blow to company’s cash flow, Auralic went into liquidation sometime in September. The company CEO since 2009, Xuanqian Wang, has resigned in January 2025 “to pursue other projects”. Rumours in the industry suggest that Auralic IP is for sale for a sum of $2 million, but no contenders reported as yet.
An iteresting suggestion was floated by one of the Auralic distributors: if no buyer is found, Auralic can volunteer to make the firmware open-source. While this seems to be a good solution, it probaly won’t be viable in real world because of API licensing and IPs of other software makers involved in firmware engineering.
Written by Sergei Taranov
