In my system sits a fairly high end streamer which connects to my router via wifi. Also connected to my router, this time via a Cat5e cable (I’ve tried several and a Cat6a) is a CD ripper with an SSD in it. Comparing ripped CDs to Qobuz I mostly enjoy the ripped CDs more but Qobuz is still very acceptable.
Playing CDs sounds better than Qobuz — dammit
I’ve built a decent HeadFi rig over the past few months and am quite happy with it streaming Qobuz as a source via my iPad/iPhone. I recently brought my CD player into the rig as there are some reference CDs I need that aren’t available on Qobuz. Well, I made the mistake of playing some CDs and compared them to Qobuz, and in every case the CD sounds better — specifically a quieter background and more transparency overall. I’ve got good cables from the dongle out of my iPad to the USB cable that runs to my DAC for streaming, so let’s leave cables out of the discussion for now because I think this goes deeper than that. Needless to say I’m pretty disappointed right now because I’ve enjoyed not spinning discs over the past year or so and certainly don’t wanna go back to buying CDs again. Ugh.
So, what I’m thinking is that streaming over WiFi through my iDevices may be the bottleneck. IF that’s the case and I need to up my streaming game, what would be the cheapest way to go to overcome the bottleneck? My thought is going hardwired (which I can do) to something like an iFi Stream or maybe a ProJect Streambox, but just wondering if that’d get it done? Something else? I need something pre-made and won’t wrestle with doing a Raspberry Pi with hats, etc. as I have no patience for configuring/troubleshooting tech. Thanks for any advice/thoughts.
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I used to use a dongle and when I switched to a hard wired streamer the sound quality drastically improved.
I have used Qubuz, tidal, radio paradise, Spotify. TuneIn and they all sound very good. Just as good as the CD.
Tidal and Qubuz are probably tops.
There is also variation depending on the song. That's probably the biggest difference. |
@soix Everything is going to sound different, better or worse. Different CD players are going to sound different but one thing I can honestly say is that a computer, NUC or Raspberry POS is never going to sound as good as a quality dedicated storage/streamer. From experience I really tried to get the computer thing to work but it just doesn't. If you want real sound you have to get a dedicated streamer with everything that goes with it, but first rip your CDs and see what sound you're getting from a quality storage device not a NAS or USB/HDD. |
So, @vanson1 you seem to have a similar experience to mine. What streamer did you find was a big improvement over streaming through iDevices? |
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