Sound Quality

Typically you will get very equivalent sound from an N200 with say red book stored files and streaming. The mastering and resolution will bring up the sound quality. FLAC tend to sound better than WAV.

Overall it sounds like the stored files you inherited were perhaps compromised. You can use a laptop or computer to rip the files. Rip to FLAC. There are lots of programs available, including Apples.

Overall, I no longer wast time with stored files. Streaming sounds as good (red book) or better when streaming higher resolution. I would work to optimize streaming and just use the stored files as backup in case the network goes down.

Qobuz sounds better than tidal, but not by a huge amount. They have over half a million high resolution albums, so they are the preferred source.

I see you are using a Gustard R26 DAC. One of the next steps might be to upgrade that. The N200 sound quality can be really very good.

Yep agree a test file of known high quality stored on your drive should equal a streamed file…. should….

Also, after doing that try to reserve judgment until your Bricasti arrives and broken  in…

Don't make it too complicated, at least at first.  Most music out there is CD quality and that should be your first goal.. but it isn't quite that simple.

Playing CDs was simple but you were a slave to the DAC in the CD player, which was often poor.  Then we started getting excellent standalone DACs.  And we switched from CD players to CD transports to use with our standalone DACs.  

Now once you have a good DAC, streaming just requires a good streamer.

Upscaling is the one thing you listed that might be worth pursuing at first but don't worry if it doesn't fit into your budget.  I have a Grimm streamer with built in upscaling but don't know what other models have this.

Keep it simple and enjoy.

Jerry

@navyachts are you referring to SSD drive mounted inside your N200 that contains that music library?
Few things based on my experience…it depends on the recording. Not all DSD files are by default better sounding than redbook or hi-res streaming. It also depends on the DAC. You will be able to feed the M1S2 a native DSD signal and take full advantage of the Bricasti DSD DAC.
In addition, the N200 sound quality streaming Qobuz is slightly better than Tidal (at least to my ears in my system) but in general it is on a high enough level to not have to bother with ripping CDs. I’ve tested it against CDs and most of the time preferred hi-res streaming.

To answer your question on what to use to rip 💿 - I use dbpoweramp and rip to uncompressed FLAC.

Part of the problem with streaming quality is that the services don’t care about what they upload; if the version they buy the license for is crappy, the resolution doesn’t matter.  Yes, Many CDs are crappy too, but one can often find better versions.  That might explain the differences people hear between CDs and streaming.