CD Player vs. music streaming

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.

audiotroy Are you indicating that running an SPDIF from an Esoteric P-05X to a COS Engineering D2 DAC is inferior sounding due to jitter problems? I thought this was a rather high end quality musical sound despite not being SOTA. I am using a near SOTA balanced cable. I thoroughly dislike HDMI for audio and am not too keen on USB. I like lots of connectivity with low resistance in a cable. Should I dump my digital system and get a cheap streamer DAC instead to play my CDs through another transport and USB only cable or some other cable you prefer?