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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?  



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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...
austinstereo's avatar
austinstereo OP
61 posts
 
We just received the  Arylic Up2Stream S10 yesterday, and spent some time with it.  So far, we've just been playing tracks from Tidal.  While it most likely falls short of the Bluesound (we've not had one of these in the shop yet), it's pretty impressive.  Especially for under $100!  Just to underscore a point, many of our customers spend less than $1000 for their entire system.  

The Arylic ticks the boxes of native streaming of Tidal, and a good chunk of the other streaming services.  The 4stream app works pretty well so far.  We've yet to try DLNA streaming or local media playback.  And like all native streamers, it has a Bluetooth receiver.  Bluetooth 5.0 in fact.  The included remote is surprisingly good.  A welcome plus to not have to reach for your phone just to mute it, or change volume.   

We currently have it on a system with a Sound Valves VTP 100, a Hafler DH220 and a pair of Fyne 303s.  The performance is very listenable.  If anything it errs towards the softer end sonically, rather than the edgy hard character of some budget digital players.  This was especially true of the Dayton WBA-31, which is no comparison.  Quite surprising for something so inexpensive.  
cal3713's avatar
cal3713
1,421 posts
 
@danvignau & @goofyfoot This 6moons review of the PWT opens with almost two pages of technical details about why non-realtime playback of a cd from data storage is superior to the traditional method used in most cd players (which, as you correctly point out, do also include a memory buffer). 

http://6moons.com/audioreviews/psaudio7/perfectwave.html
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