June 3rd, 2020
Peachtree Audio Wi-Fi update

Greetings All,

We hope this letter finds you in good health during this difficult time. The Wi-Fi story with Peachtree has been a long one so we'll try to get to the point quickly. Bear with us because there's a happy ending. As most of you know our goal was to ship the optional module as soon as we could after the nova500 began shipping in November 2018. We are now more than 18 months out and still see a long road ahead for the LinkPlay engineers working on the project. In addition, we see an even longer road ahead to add new streaming services like amazon music HD and other great features like Roon integration. In short, we did a little homework and found that LinkPlay's largest customers were all demanding they provide Alexa support, so all the high-resolution features they were working on for their high-end customers were put on the back burner. We don't typically describe what goes on behind the scenes but this has gone on a long time and we want to be transparent. So we have made the very difficult decision to suspend work on the internal wireless input project altogether and take an entirely different path to deliver a class-leading solution.

During the time the LinkPlay engineers were developing their firmware for our upgrade, the Peachtree team was exploring alternative options. The overarching goal for the entire Peachtree wireless program was to ensure that it provides excellent sound quality and access to the high-resolution streaming services our customers requested the most. After an exhaustive evaluation process, Peachtree has chosen to enter into a formal relationship with the folks at Lenbrook and, more specifically, to put our full support behind the incredible BluOS wireless system.

Our team was extremely impressed with BluOS's ability to reliably stream true high-resolution audio from services like Qobuz and amazon music HD and to output it digitally to the DACs inside our nova products. BluOS's stand-alone streaming product, the NODE 2i, had everything we were planning to add to our nova products and much, much more!

To understand the main feature differences, this chart shows what LinkPlay was working on for their high-end customers (like Peachtree) and what the Bluesound NODE 2i includes:

As you can see the NODE 2i + BluOS has all the features we would have provided along with many others we would not have been able to. It is a better solution now and for the future.