Streamer creates a Wow experience

Streaming vs. cd sound quality is no longer the issue. Streaming wins on the availability of music and ease with which it can be accessed. Now, my own experience during the time I was transitioning from cd's to cd rips, was that the rips had better sound quality than cd's, this was the final nail in coffin for cd's, and I had well over 3.5k cd's to rip, took me a couple years, what a pain!

I'd like to be convinced there is a single music player software that is superior to all the others. I've observed reviews of the software for years, opinions all over the place. At some point its likely I'll try some proprietary player. The excellent sound quality I'm getting with Roon at present certainly doesn't give me feeling I'm leaving something on the table. I have found that turning OFF every single process possible with Roon provides best sound quality. I also presume Roon has deepest pockets of all the music player software app providers, assume greater knowledge base of engineers working on things like sound quality, ease of use, etc.

Per sound quality music player software. What makes me somewhat skeptical is while some claim they hear differences in sound quality with Roon updates, I can't confidently claim I hear them. I'd have to do A>B>A comparison from some rather old Roon iteration to latest to really test for this. Still, not writing this off as possible or even likely, I just think the small differences between iterations make it difficult to hear.

Don't listen to those who claim lps and usb no good, total nonsense. Lps always good, usb superior in some cases, other times not, depends on implementation. One must optimize both usb out of server/streamer and usb in on dac.

@reimarc 

+1 for Aurender streamers. They have outstanding good sound quality every level of price / quality. They are completely self contained, so no need to play around with other software. You can easily move any files you want onto them. These are audiophile components. Plunk them down and the provide outstanding sound quality. I have two (see my ID). 
 

Their Conductor App is excellent and well regarded for its simplicity and power. 

I just wanted to do a separate post for those who may want to stream Qobuz through the iFi Zen as Qobuz as of yet cannot stream direct to the Zen. At first I thought maybe I made a horrible mistake getting the Zen as my sole source for streaming is Qobuz. I had visions of wrestling with third-party apps trying to get everything to work together — it seemed like a nightmare for sure headed my way, especially because I’m just awful at dealing with anything computer related.

Long story short, I needn’t have worried, and this is one of those VERY rare instances where everything just worked. To get Qobuz to work with the Zen you need to download the mconnect app. This made me nervous as the app only had like a 3-star rating, which had me really worried this was going to be a bad experience with glitches galore. Anyway, to minimize potential issues I plunked down the $5.99 for the mconnectHD version, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Once you have your Zen hooked into your WiFi, you just go into the app, choose Qobuz and sign into your Qobuz account when prompted, and that’s it — you’re done. Even I couldn’t screw it up, and that’s seriously saying something because I’m a pro at finding problems where there are none.

Here’s the best part — once these steps were completed, everything just worked! Imagine that. Qobuz popped up in the mconnect app, and all my playlists, favorites, etc. were there. It takes a few minutes to find the search function because the layout is a bit different from the Qobuz site, but it’s all there and it all works just as it should. I couldn’t believe when I hit play, the green light lit up on the Zen, and music started playing. Not only did music start playing, but it sounded absolutely glorious — much better than playing CDs at least in my system (admittedly I’m just using an Oppo through SPDIF as a transport, so take this for what it’s worth).

Sorry for being so long winded, but I just wanted to assure anyone who may be considering this route that it’s really easy to implement and the results are incredible. Hope this helps.

pdreher

I know many here like Aurender, but found it to be very buggy and had connectivity issues that I was unable to resolve, despite numerous exchanges with Aurender customer support ... I just couldn’t get it to work consistently and had to move on.

My experience was similar. I bought my Aurender new from an authorized dealer and it really never worked properly. Support wasn’t very helpful and because audio is a hobby and supposed to be fun, I dumped it and moved on.

To be fair, it sounded pretty good when it worked.

Innuos is another manufacturer that should be on everyone’s radar. It made a positive change in my system. Their Sense 2.0 software is amazing and SQ-wise it’s better than Roon. However, you also have the option to run it not only as a Roon endpoint but also as a Roon server. Plus you get a built-in CD ripper and local storage to save CDs and DSD files.