Streamer suggestions with both wireless and wired connections

My Blusound Node works well on wireless.  We live in a single family house and our wifi is pretty good.  I think maybe apartment dwellers or others with a whole lotta traffic on wifi might like using wired LAN better.

I have owned and streamed using PC, MAC, IPad, $2K, $3.5K, $5K, $10K, $13K, and $22K streamers. In each case absolutely worth the increased sound quality supplied by that level of investment / performance assuming you have a system.. DAC, Preamp, Amp and speakers to support that level of performance. Also, you choose the best in class at that level of investment.

I have found that with a good quality streamer it does not matter if feed by wifi (wall wart wifi extender) or Ethernet direct from router… but for some reason I have not had good luck with onboard wifi receivers.

Great quality streamers like Aurender clean up the incoming signal, cashe the stream to make up for network deficiencies and do not require any fiddling with your network. My Aurrender work flawlessly from a wall wart extender even when I cannot get the pages to refresh on my iPad.

@ghdprentice

In each case absolutely worth the increased sound quality supplied by that level of investment / performance assuming you have a system.. DAC, Preamp, Amp and speakers to support that level of performance.

With your experience, care to estimate the appropriate importance of streamer relative to rest of the system? I assume Speaker + Amp far more important, then the DAC, then streamer. So would that make streamer worthy of 1/3 your speaker investment?

@michaelalan

If you do your research and buy best of class then Streamer ~= DAC ~= Preamp ~= amp. Over time for me again and again my end system after an upgrade ends there. Typically my speakers will be the more expensive than my components. I’ll put 35% investment for component / speakers into speakers. I don’t include interconnects… I blow my whole budget… then as I learn about the sound of my new system and as my finances recover I start purchasing cables. My objective is to reach the maximum sound quality for my system so I can happily stay there for 7 to 10 years.

So for my headphone system my streamer $3.5K, DAC $4K, amp $5K. Main system: Streamer $22K, DAC $17K, Preamp $17K, amp $22K. I tried a $13K streamer… definitely lost a lot… I tried a $22K DAC and it was a tiny bit better, but a tiny less musical. So, it is only a rough guide.

But it also makes sense to me because another of my rules of thumb are that it takes 2x careful investment to make a “wow” that is a lot better. I find the high end audio industry is pretty competitive and if your component doesn’t outperform lessor ones, then your not in the running.

I am using a Blue sound Nide 2i streamer (not as a dac though) for already several years, sometimes I use my computer and actually I note no essential difference in sound quality.

This begs the question, what music service are you using and what’s in the rest of your system because this flies far in the face of the experience of the vast majority of members here.  Put another way and more directly, something seems really amiss here.  The more info you provide here the better and more meaningful help and recommendations you’ll receive, so please share more if you’re willing.