new to streaming- help!

@motown-l My deepest apologies — I misread your post.  The WiiM Pro gets decent reviews for sound and is pretty small (5.5” square x 1.6”h).  FWIW.

As you can see from this thread the standard opinion is that PCs are not good for streaming. My experience has been different. I have an ASUS gaming laptop hooked up to my DAC with a USB cable (I'm using Qobuz). I have compared several CDs to their streamed counterparts through the same DAC and found that there is no detectable difference in their sound. It turns out that most people have not tried this themselves - they just repeat the conventional wisdom that you have to have a streamer to get good sound. Never mind that this "wisdom" is perpetrated by an industry that wants to sell you streamers.

If the streamed content through a computer sounds just as good as the CD then my position is that is as good as it gets. It's unreasonable to assume that you will get better sound from streaming after the WAV file is broken into packets, sent over thousands miles of wire and dozens of routers, reassembled into a streamed file, and run through another piece of digital gear as opposed to the simplicity of spinning a CD - a mature technology that the industry has had decades to perfect..

Before you do back flips and spend tons of money on a streamer I strongly suggest that you compare streaming from your iMac to a few CDs and see if you can hear the difference. If the computer sounds inferior then by all means get a dedicated streamer. But I think there's a pretty good chance that it will sound the same as the CD and you can be comfortable that your simple solution is just fine.

BTW, I do think that whatever you use for streaming, you should hook it up to the router with an ethernet cable instead of using wifi. I have 100 gig fiber and the wifi occasionally had dropouts so now I use an ethernet cable.

OP,

Keep at it, for the average person even an entry level dedicated streamer will best a computer based system.....though some techie types have figured out how to do it well. The BlueSound OS is excellent, and the Node X is a talented streamer. Yes if you can, go directly into the Node with an ethernet connection.....others can help if an extender or mesh system is helpful.

I have an ASUS gaming laptop hooked up to my DAC with a USB cable (I’m using Qobuz). I have compared several CDs to their streamed counterparts through the same DAC and found that there is no detectable difference in their sound. It turns out that most people have not tried this themselves

@8th-note I did, and I’m sure many others here have as well — we audiophiles just can’t help ourselves. I started streaming from my computer (also with Qobuz) and was pretty happy with the sound, but one day I got curious and did a direct A/B comparison with CDs using my transport into the same DAC and was pretty depressed when I found CDs to consistently sound significantly better across the board — not even close. The noise floor dropped, imaging popped, soundstage expanded, and dynamics improved. It was like moving from MP3 to CD resolution if I were to make an apt analogy. This was a bad day as an audiophile. When I brought this up here several people said I needed to get a dedicated streamer, so still a little skeptical I heeded that advice and bought a used iFi Zen Stream, which is decent but by no means is a high-end streamer, and BAM! Right away it was clear the streaming now significantly bettered CDs. The difference was not subtle, and needless to say I was very happy and greatly relieved (and very appreciative of the sage advice and encouragement I got here!). Likewise I’d encourage anyone using a computer source who thinks it sounds good to at least try a dedicated streamer — you might be surprised, as I was, about how much performance you may be leaving on the (computer) table.

@soix +1

This was my experience as well, though I just upgraded my streamer from a Sonos Connect rather than a PC. Night and day difference.