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Where are the cheap home streamers?

When CD players were first introduced, they were $1000 and more new.  And this was in early 80's dollars.  New ones would eventually drop to under $200, and new players that also play most all formats can still be had around at that price or less.  Sure, not the best quality, but they work well enough for most.  

The new frontier is of course, streaming.  Whether from a local host, online, and so on.  Many options in the high end, but what seems odd is the lack of budget options.  Probably the least expensive that's of decent quality is the Sonos Connect.  Oh sure, you can pair a computer or tablet with a cheap DAC, and get by.  Or roll your own with a Raspberry Pi solution.  And yes, most disc players are "smart" and can stream audio and video just fine.  Among other issues, is that the budget options are defaulting to HDMI out, and omitting Optical, Digital, and Analog out.  

There were some early efforts by Sony and Dlink a few years ago.  Both not only required a display, but were pretty terrible implementations overall.  We recently tried one of the Dayton WBA 31s.  For a mere $50, expectations were of course also modest.  As you might imagine, analog audio out is not great.  Below that of many phones we'd say.  It does however had an optical output.  A dealbreaker for most of our clients in terms of added complexity.  If produced in sufficient number, there is no good reason such a unit with a decent DAC couldn't be built and sold for $200 or so.  Or maybe someone is doing this, and it's just not well distributed?  



128x128austinstereo
ejr1953
915 posts
 
When I started down the "streaming path" I installed the Tidal streaming app on a Dell laptop I already owned, with my purchased music managed by iTunes.  The resulting sound quality (output from the laptop's USB to my DAC) was "good".

My next improvement was to subscribe to Roon, running the core on that laptop, occasionally using the app on it as the UI (user interface), when not using my iPad or Android phone for that.

I finally upgraded my streaming infrastructure by purchasing a Roon Nucleus Plus server, which has a much better USB port and is just "rock solid".  It's not "cheap", but well worth the investment!
austinstereo's avatar
austinstereo OP
61 posts
 
@danvignau More and more recordings are available in high resolution, and that is a whole other can of worms. And yes, I would agree that some recordings benefit more than others from hi-res 24 bit.  

I was mainly referring to "lossless" audio.  By that I mean files that are bitwise the same as what would have been on the CD.  Flac, AAC, Wav, and so on.  Tidal and Amazon currently offer lossless streaming among others.   
cal3713's avatar
cal3713
1,421 posts
 
@danvignau No read errors or noise injected from the CD player mechanics. You'll note that some CD players (e.g., PS audio's well reviewed transport) use a computer drive and copy the track off the drive and then feed the data to the dac from memory in order to maximize sound quality. That's essentially what the streamer is doing. You're eliminating all moving parts and the issues they bring to the table. 

And critically, getting a giant boost to the size of your available music library in the process, which is the real reason to move to streaming in my opinion.
danvignau's avatar
danvignau
935 posts
 
Some mentioned that PS Audio, etc have CD players that put the music into a memory and then stream it.  Yes they do.  That memory is called a buffer, and was first used, if not invented, for Sony's Discman, to make a CD that skips when you run from sounding like it is skipping.  Nearly all CD players do this. 
goofyfoot's avatar
goofyfoot
1,376 posts
 
danvignau, totally agree, it doesn’t make since but having a huge catalogue at your fingertips for $22.00 per month is a bargain. Also, Qobuz offers high resolution streaming. I believe streaming today is a natural progression from the mp3 era, a way to access music conveniently. My biggest objection is that streaming services don’t offer remasters from MOFI, Analogue Productions, etc...
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