CD Player vs. music streaming

Hello guys a few points on this thread.

People here have to stop lauding the Bluesound Node as a high end solution, yes the Node sounds great for a $550.00 streamer and has an excellent gui and operating system, however, in a really good system it is not going to cut it as a dac or a streamer.

We consider the first real step at high end sound quality to be the Lumin D2 which in our tests far outperformed the Cambridge 851N.

Tatyanah, listen to an Innous Server particularly the Zen or Zenith the improvement in sound quality over either direct streaming or using a lower quality streamer is very noticable.

Mroeturner, you should try to get a demo of the Innous servers particularly the Zenith you will notice a very large improvement over the Nucleus. The Innous servers are far more technologically advanced in terms of noise reduction over the Nucleus  units, the Zen, Zenith and Statement models also feature an incoming and outgoing set of ethernet noise filters,  to keep noise out of the unit and to transmit a better quality ethernet signal to a streaming dac.

We have been playing in this arena for many years, a good server or a good streamer/dac will outperform a CD player easily, that is not saying there aren’t fantastic CD players but in all of our tests including a one of the world’s best CD players the T+A PDP 3000 is bettered by T+A’s stand alone reference dac with an Innous server or the Formula or the Ligtht Harmonic Davinci dual dac, these setups challenge the best in analog for a sense of palbability and pureness of midrange naturalness.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ

Bigg greg, 

You have not heard how good a streamer can sound vs your CD player or turntable as most high end dacs take USB and the Blue Sound Node can only output Coax or Toslink. This is a serious compromise with the Node.

The other issue is that most high end dacs will generate less jitter when run asyncronoously which is impossible when you are running spdif or aes/ebu, clocking is dramatically improved when the dac is controlling the incomming data 

The other point is that a high end server will allow you to expereience high resolution files either high sampled rate PCM or DSD files most people will prefer the greater ambience and larger soundstage of upsampled data.

You are correct that Blue Sound does offer a ton of great streaming sources more than most, othe than the other big players Sonos and Deno Heos which do seem to offer similar sources.

A Roon server the Innous servers sound fantastic and can play Tidal, Obouz, and can play streaming intenet local and international stations and that includes Radio Paradise.

The higher end models allows for upconversion and upsampling depending on your dac. 

A Zen Mini starts at $1,200.00 and thehgiher end models go up from there. 

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Innous and Blue Sound dealers

Big Greg the reasons you mentioned are one reason we recommend the Lumin products so highly.

They are designed to last a long time with a product lifecycle of 5-7 years

The firmware is constantly being upgraded as improvements to the devices are implemented.

The Lumin products sound fantaastic and in each price catagory are among the best sounding devices in their price range.

The Lumin products include Spotify, Tidal, Obouze,Internet Radio and Apple Airplay, designated Roon endpoint, and MQA built in.

The Airplay function is fantastic most people use an Ipad to control their Lumin this gives you the ability to stream Youtube as well as Soundcloud or any other Airplay compatible streaming app.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Lumin dealers

Ketchup are you incredulous that an Auralic or Aurender server is besting the Node? 

In our tests the better the data stream the better the sound to the dac. 

We have tested the original Auralic Aries vs the Aurender and the Aurender was far better

We  feel that the Innous are a fantastic choice due to their implimentation of Roon, great sound quality, continuous firmware upgrades, and near total reliablity and ease of use.

Many people who compare these servers are shocked just how much better sound out of a digital data stream can be created when you minimize jitter and timing related distortions from the data stream.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Innous dealers

Ketchup please don't take this the wrong way we were not attacking you, the point was being made that so many people here belive that bits are bits with digital and there is no way that a server can make a difference.  If we came accross harsh please accept the appology.

Mgrif, we don't have a Lumin U1 so we can't verify your findings, we do have the D2 and T2 which can function as a server,  also there are a lot of settings on the U1 which include upsampling and cross conversion which in some cases can make the Lumin and dac combo really perform. 

We almost never run straight 16/44k on the Lumin instead we run it at high data rate PCM or DSD and wow the Lumin products go way up in sound quality.

Also were you running USB on the Aurnder vs coax on the other two?

We have only tired the older Aries which was okay, our current favorite is the Innous which we feel are even more magical than the Aurender, however, the Aurender which we used to sell are also outstanding. 

One of the strongest advantages of the Lumin U1 and Innous servers is the ability to upconvert or cross convert to DSD  and again with a dac that can handle those signals the digital sounds way more analog  like.

Joshfin, yes the storred CD's do sound even better, however there are a few tricks you can use to up the sound quality on the Statement, please  PM so we can go over this with you.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Innous, NAD dealers