The Bluesound streamers have gotten better over the years. I’ve had the Node 2, 2i and now the X, and each one has sounded better. Not sure how much better a $1k plus streamer would sound compared to the latest Node. Never did the power supply mod on any of them, but might go for that down the road and still keep the cost reasonable.
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Just a word of caution. Optical connections tend to be poor. Typically they are add in functions and the component manufacturer just sources an inexpensive electrical to optical converter to do it. In general, these are not the connections people serious about sound quality would use. So, it is very possible what is coming through is more of how well the optical converter was integrated. I would use SP/DIF or AES for sound quality comparisons. Of course, then it is a question of how well the streamer and CD transports manufacturer designed and built their components. |
I’ve had the blue sound, the Lumin, the Cambridge, the overall advice is that it’s hard to logically separate what these devices do. If it’s only to transport bits into a DAC, or to provide a processed signal, and does it attenuate volume? One of these three will give clues as to what may cause audible differences. My bet is in that pesky volume knob. I ended up with a crazy expensive preamp just because that volume knob seemed to make a huge difference. I’m thrilled with the Apple TV to control the music and deliver bits to the dac and then preamp has the volume knob. If a product can handle all three it’s great but all I’ve listed didn’t tick the box in my listening. |
@ghdprentice The TOSLINK optical link was specifically designed for 2-channel audio for CD quality bandwidth. The interface components at either end are of mature design, not a "throw in" item of questionable design. Optical cables are immune to EMI/RFI and ground loop problems. Optical can have jitter on the order of a few nano-seconds. Any decent DAC will easily deal with that. SPDIF can suffer EMI/RFI and ground loop issues. A clock signal is embedded that has to be recovered. Potential jitter is data dependent and there are low pass and high pass filtering effects to deal with. Properly implemented either TOSLINK or SPDIF is more than adequate for high quality serious audio.
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