It's good that Shaft and Foxy Brown no longer roam the streets. Aurora belongs into today's home or office. There it's stylish good looks and upscale sonic ambitions are best served. Custom Bluetooth streaming supports aptX HD, LDAC, LDHC and AAC whilst any UPnP or DLNA streaming app like Linkplay's Muzo player can configure and control your streaming. AirPlay and Spotify Connect are included. Only voice activation isn't.

That was no shaft. On the contrary. Considering such advanced featurization from this type concept would usually push the bounds of credulity unless perhaps the maker were Bang & Olufsen. But then the price would fly higher. What makes Aurora unique is its refusal to use DSP for room adaptation; to include location measuring in the device itself; and to cook up a class D output stage which switches far higher than the norm.

Clearly there's a lot of serious engineering tucked beneath this round-cornered bamboo hood.

It warrants further education by designer Thorsten Loesch. For some background on him, read Michael Lavorgna's old interview. For more on Aurora when it was still called Project Glastonbury, watch John Darko's video with Thorsten where…

… we learn that Aurora's wired/wireless platform is inherited directly from their iDSD Pro whilst the clock-lock technology has been extended not only to the switching output stage but switching power supplies. It has everything run off one clock. That combats jitter "like marching soldiers where nobody is allowed to step out of line".

And forget all about our usual associated equipment listing. For once it's mostly superfluous. Aurora just needs a source signal to come alive. What a relief from the usual hifi worship. No more altar of big rack stack. With Aurora, the audio purist meets fashion-conscious mid-century/modern lifestyle. All of 59 x 27 x 29cm WxHxD is the real estate you must give up for it. That's very little for a lot. 15kg of raw weight assure us that this is no Bose table radio. This could go into a home office, bedroom or student's den. It could have gone into any of the boats I once lived on docked in the Marina del Rey. Today it could feature on the Sharper Image website or in an Apple store. It already sells at Harrods of London. It's everyman writ large as signed by a tech-driven brand whose Chinese factory affords us pricing that would be perfectly impossible were iFi's manufacture located in their British headquarters.