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Playing CDs sounds better than Qobuz — dammit

I’ve built a decent HeadFi rig over the past few months and am quite happy with it streaming Qobuz as a source via my iPad/iPhone.  I recently brought my CD player into the rig as there are some reference CDs I need that aren’t available on Qobuz.  Well, I made the mistake of playing some CDs and compared them to Qobuz, and in every case the CD sounds better — specifically a quieter background and more transparency overall.  I’ve got good cables from the dongle out of my iPad to the USB cable that runs to my DAC for streaming, so let’s leave cables out of the discussion for now because I think this goes deeper than that.  Needless to say I’m pretty disappointed right now because I’ve enjoyed not spinning discs over the past year or so and certainly don’t wanna go back to buying CDs again.  Ugh.

So, what I’m thinking is that streaming over WiFi through my iDevices may be the bottleneck.  IF that’s the case and I need to up my streaming game, what would be the cheapest way to go to overcome the bottleneck?  My thought is going hardwired (which I can do) to something like an iFi Stream or maybe a ProJect Streambox, but just wondering if that’d get it done?  Something else?  I need something pre-made and won’t wrestle with doing a Raspberry Pi with hats, etc. as I have no patience for configuring/troubleshooting tech.  Thanks for any advice/thoughts. 

soix
ghdprentice
7,051 posts
 

You do not need to hardwire a streamer. Just get a wall wart wifi extender and put next to your streamer… plug into that. Put as much into the streamer as you can…. It makes a difference. As I may have said, I have owned $3K, $5K, $10K, and $22K streamers and each brought a huge increase in sound quality. You can add little tweaks like a Ethernet regenerator… etc. The important thing is to get a great streamer. 

mrpsync
31 posts
 

Not sure this will help… but I recently tried to improve my streaming SQ because I was disappointed that my iPad via camera adapter (usb) sounded better than coax from my node 2i to my “new” Gustard x26 pro DAC. I thought at the time that the reason why was because the usb implementation was superior to coax (And that may well be at least partially true….. I don’t know) on the Gustard. So I ordered the Ifi stream and updated the cat cables when hooKing up my new Ifi directly to Gustard via usb. Long story short the iFi wasn’t for me, but I now believe that the adaptor sounded better (again, at least partially) because my wifi sounded better then Ethernet connection. I came to that conclusion because I changing my Ethernet cables to Cat 8’s made the node2i sounds better via coax then the iPad via adaptor. Total cost was $30 bucks for two 6 foot linkup cat 8’s.

 

 

fiesta75
1,378 posts
 

Yes CD's beat any streamers I've heard regardless of the DAC used. Convenience is not there yet. Best wishes.

jmalen123
163 posts
 

My Marantz SACD7S3 has crushed every streamer I have tried so far. And that makes me happy.

Ag insider logo xs@2x
shosugi
20 posts
 

soix - if your budget is $1500, that will buy a nice stack of used (or new) CDs.

I really like CDs, and I still have not upgraded to streaming.  My CD collection includes material from MFSL, DCC, JVC XRCD, Telarc, FIM, etc.  And of course you can visit the Steve Hoffman forums, and really go down the rabbit hole of comparing various pressings/re-issues of CDs.

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