CD Player vs. music streaming

Hello guys a few points on this thread.

People here have to stop lauding the Bluesound Node as a high end solution, yes the Node sounds great for a $550.00 streamer and has an excellent gui and operating system, however, in a really good system it is not going to cut it as a dac or a streamer.

We consider the first real step at high end sound quality to be the Lumin D2 which in our tests far outperformed the Cambridge 851N.

Tatyanah, listen to an Innous Server particularly the Zen or Zenith the improvement in sound quality over either direct streaming or using a lower quality streamer is very noticable.

Mroeturner, you should try to get a demo of the Innous servers particularly the Zenith you will notice a very large improvement over the Nucleus. The Innous servers are far more technologically advanced in terms of noise reduction over the Nucleus  units, the Zen, Zenith and Statement models also feature an incoming and outgoing set of ethernet noise filters,  to keep noise out of the unit and to transmit a better quality ethernet signal to a streaming dac.

We have been playing in this arena for many years, a good server or a good streamer/dac will outperform a CD player easily, that is not saying there aren’t fantastic CD players but in all of our tests including a one of the world’s best CD players the T+A PDP 3000 is bettered by T+A’s stand alone reference dac with an Innous server or the Formula or the Ligtht Harmonic Davinci dual dac, these setups challenge the best in analog for a sense of palbability and pureness of midrange naturalness.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ

Have to generally agree with Audiotroy here.  I have a Node 2.  It’s an incredible unit for the price, but it’s not a high end streamer. It sounds great, but is easily bested by better units. In my experience, the streamer quality is as or more important than the DAC.  While I don’t have experience with Innuos server/streamers, I do with Aurender and Auralic as I own units from both companies and have been able to do A/B comparisons against the Node 2.  No contest.

And, if you pay attention to the details, a better streamer playing Tidal or Qoboz will easily equal a high quality CD player.  And, if you have files stored on a NAS, even better yet.  

My Bluesound Node 2 into my Auralic Vega sounds really good, but my turntables and CD player best it.  I'd like to get a better sounding streamer, but everything I've looked at seems to be a downgrade from BlueOS in terms of usability and the variety of streaming sources supported and some apps only work on iPad. I use both Tidal and Qobuz, which many seem to support.  Radio Paradise seems to be missing from most.  I could live without that, but it's a nice to have.  I'd prefer a streamer that doesn't have a DAC, but that's not a deal killer.  I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing.  The Lumin D2 or T2 look like good options, but I wonder how fast they'll become obsolete.

Bigg greg, 

You have not heard how good a streamer can sound vs your CD player or turntable as most high end dacs take USB and the Blue Sound Node can only output Coax or Toslink. This is a serious compromise with the Node.

The other issue is that most high end dacs will generate less jitter when run asyncronoously which is impossible when you are running spdif or aes/ebu, clocking is dramatically improved when the dac is controlling the incomming data 

The other point is that a high end server will allow you to expereience high resolution files either high sampled rate PCM or DSD files most people will prefer the greater ambience and larger soundstage of upsampled data.

You are correct that Blue Sound does offer a ton of great streaming sources more than most, othe than the other big players Sonos and Deno Heos which do seem to offer similar sources.

A Roon server the Innous servers sound fantastic and can play Tidal, Obouz, and can play streaming intenet local and international stations and that includes Radio Paradise.

The higher end models allows for upconversion and upsampling depending on your dac. 

A Zen Mini starts at $1,200.00 and thehgiher end models go up from there. 

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Innous and Blue Sound dealers

Big_Greg,

do you have a dealer where you can demo some units at home?  My experience suggests that there are very large gains in going upstream from the Node 2. Indeed, I think the streamer might be more important than the DAC.  I’m getting pretty remarkable results from an Aries G2 streamer and from an Aurender N100.  They’re much better than the Node 2 I still have.