Bluesound Vault Combined with Node 2

@llary - You can improve the sound of the Bluesound considerably - if you use good power cable and IC's - to the point where a separate DAC is no longer required. Good power cables are the best bang for the buck

All my Bluesound devices have great cables and perform brilliantly!

WRT UPDATES: If you miss an update on a unit it generally goes into update mode the next time you turn it on - it's very simple
- Or you can click on the HELP - UPDATE menu items on the BluOS software interface to update immediately
- DO NOT power the unit off during an update.

Also, someone mentioned the Bluesound Wifi is not that good
- I have heard this many times and I am left puzzled
- My wireless router is in the basement and I can get the Pulse Mini to work flawlessly in the garden (some 80 ft away) even at 24/192
- I think id depends on the wireless router you have and NOT the Bluesound unit
- some neighbours installed repeaters - which seem to be required IF oyu are using the wireless router installed by your service provider
- I installed my ow router

If oyu want to know more about cables I can recommend some

Regards - Steve

Steve, thanks for the info. I may be agreeing with you. I finally got the optical cable that connects the vault to the DAC last night. I did a quick test against my Theta Miles CD player (which I’m hoping to replace with the vault) and the CD player blew away the vault (going through the DAC.) I am using very good audio cables (LAT International). Today I will test the vault directly connected to my amp against the vault going through the DAC. I will also see if there are any adjustments I can make on the DAC to improve things. 

As far as the node 2 in my bedroom, it’s working great on WiFi. So I agree with you about the possibility of Wi-Fi being the problem rather than the node 2 for those folks out there not getting good results. 

As you suggest, I may end up returning the DAC. I’ll know in the next day or two once I test everything. 

An update to my November 10 posting: Some very interesting findings!

> Comparing the sound of the vault alone against the vault thru the Qutest DAC and both against the Theta Miles cd player. I used eight different people in my test. I used 2 Jazz tracks from Dave Brubeck’s album “young lions and old tigers“ One track was just piano and voice, the other track was the full band.

I did blind testing of all 3 scenarios. No one knew which device they were listening to. The results: 2 of the 8 heard no difference In quality between the three. 3 of the 8 felt the Vault alone was just slightly better than both the DAC or the CD player. 2 of the 8 said the CD player was the best of all three options. Another 2 of the 8 chose the Vault with the DAC as the best sound of the 3 options when listening to the track of just the piano and voice but they chose the Vault alone when listening to the full band track. 

My conclusions: use the vault to replace the CD player and all the CDs. NO need whatsoever to spend $1000 on a DAC (at least the one I was using, the Chord electronics Qutest DAC.)

> The vault’s integration with the node 2. No change there. The Node 2 is working great in my bedroom. It talks to the vault flawlessly. No need for a wired Internet connection.

> The vault itself: 90% totally positive and in love with it. The 10% negative has to do with some of the quirks of the software.

• “Genre” category: from the more than two hundred plus CDs that I’ve already burned there are many different genres; classical, jazz, rock, reggae, blue grass, blues, Latin, etc. their software only listed one under their “genre“ category - Jazz. It did do a fairly good job of putting most of my jazz albums into that category. Talking to Bluesound’s tech-support there is no cure at this time. it has to do with how the software looks at the meta-data. So if you want to categorize your music genres, this is not the place you can do it.
• Folders: it will list only one folder - the Music folder, and that folder is exactly how the folder is created, and appears on the Vault as a NAS device when looking at the vault on a computer. If you want to categorize the different genres of music, this appears to be the best place to do it however, according to tech-support it’s a bit complicated. You have to go into the music folder on your computer, add folders to the “music“ folder and then drag the albums you want into the folder you created. Then, using the bluesound app, reindex your entire collection; which could take a considerable amount of time depending on how many CDs you’ve burned. I may do a small test of this but it scares me enough to hold off on testing it.
• Album Tagging. Another issue is the sometimes miss-tagging of an album. It will display the wrong album cover and wrong album title. This is rare in my experience; only three out of 200+ that I’ve burned so far. Note that the tracks in the album are correct. The fix for this is to install a metadata editor that is compatible with your computer and the Bluesound’s Music files; export the incorrect albums and songs into the meta-data editor, fix it there, then export them back. Definitely over my head so I will live with the issue.
• Backup: since they’re backup software is proprietary and you cannot see what’s on it you have to trust that when your vault crashes their restore feature will work. If you are overly cautious, like me, get another external drive, attach it to your computer and just copy the “music” folder over to it. Better to be safe than sorry in my book. I would not want to find out, after burning over 1000 CDs, that their backup doesn’t work.  

So, that’s it for now. Hopefully, all of this will be a value to those of you using, or wanting to use. the vault.

Update to the update: after 2+ months of loading all my CDs into the vault (over 1,000), I finally finished. According to the vaults statistics, I have only used up 12% of the hard drive, which sounds a bit too incredible to me. It displayed a total of 10,100 “songs” occupying 245 GB of disc space.

Be that as it may, it has changed my listening life completely! I now listen to CDs in my collection a good 20 times more than I used to. The ability to lie on the couch (or anywhere around the house) and play any CD, or multiple CDs, I want, in an instant, is fantastic. The ease of which I can now search for a CD, a song, a title is simply amazing. Combining albums, songs, etc. is a piece of cake. And the clarity I get through my stereo system is superb; even when using the Internet streaming services, like Amazon HD, Spotify or Radio Paradise (which is a station I highly recommend to anyone.)

Now my biggest problem is what to do with my CD collection. I have put my Theta Miles CD player on eBay and I will keep my NAD CD player as a backup in case the Vault breaks down and I sell the Miles. 

And, The Bluesound Node 2 that I have on my bedroom stereo, talks seamlessly with the Vault, giving me the best of both worlds. I cannot be happier!

Larry- what is tbe distance between the node and vault and are you using wifi ir bluetooth?

Anyone else with vault and node connections and if so, how far away can this be done by wifi?