Re: streaming recommendations for newbie

@danmar123 Yeah, at this point I’d highly recommend getting a streamer rather than tying yourself in knots trying to get your phone to work.  It needn’t be a very expensive streamer, and your sound quality will improve significantly. 

If you're happy with using a computer, adding a  USB dac is easy. I like my Schiit Modi multibit. Using other streamers will have you using your phone as an interface. I use ifi zen stream. Very inexpensive ways to try out streaming.

Just bought a smls sd-9. It seems to be of good quality. It’s more a renderer than streamer, but works for me. Has an abundance of connection options and a screen, albeit, very small. You connect it to a dac of your choice, no dac built in.

Plus one for @2psyop suggestion to get Bluesound Node X and a Teddy Pardo external power supply.  If the combination is too rich for now, you could get the Node X now, and get the Teddy Pardo later as a reasonably priced upgrade path.  If the DAC in your Sim Audio CD player is accessible from coax or optical cable and it’s fairly good quality, you might be able to get away with getting and Node N130 instead of the Node X, and then the Pardo power supply would be within your budget now.  FYI, the Node N130 benefits greatly from using a high quality coax cable, at least in my system.  If that is the route you choose for connecting to your DAC, don’t scrimp there.

kn

@soix thanks for taking the time to help me out, I really appreciate it and you (and others) have done a great job explaining all this to me. As you can tell I’m not tech savvy at all so this group has been very helpful!