CD Player vs. music streaming

Don’t be fooled, the Bluesound Node 2i is an entry level piece, decent to get started with or for background music. If you decide you want a very good setup, be prepared to sink some $$$ into it. You don’t need a dedicated streamer and I prefer not to put a streamer/computer in my audio room. Also, I will never use USB to hook up to my external dac. USB has too many flaws and there are way too many tweaks to try to get it sounding good. Also, you need a good GUI application to run your streaming/ripped setup, and you can’t get better than Roon. Keep it simple: Roon, external computer in another room running Roon, iPad/iPhone running Roon, Ethernet connection/no WiFi, good Ethernet cable (cat7/cat8), and the best dac with a network connection you can afford.

It has been proven over a decade ago that a cd will sound better played ripped from a hard drive than from a CD player. The most critical piece of the digital chain is the dac, and not all dac inputs are created equal.

Every music server you buy is a computer. The only difference a music server company will tell you is that it’s optimized for usb 2.0 playback whereas a normal pc/Mac doesn’t have that. Another gimmick trying to get usb to sound decent. There are dozens of other gimmicks/tweaks you can apply to usb to try to get it to sound decent.

If you like playing the silver discs, buy the best dac you can afford and use the i2s input on the dac if possible, coax if you don’t have a i2s input.
if starting from scratch, you can run Roon on a good performing server with 16 GB of ram and multiple cores and put this in a separate room never in the audio room. (I use a Mac either a Mac mini with 16G or an iMac with 24 G of ram, and neither of these computers ran over 20% of its processing power and just use Ethernet going out to the dac).
Get the best dac you can afford. I also use the PS Audio DS sr and DS jr dacs with their Ethernet connections. These dacs also provide i2s connections if your CD player has this output.
Keep it simple using the best gear.

Why complicate things by using a 3rd party music server by anyone? What happens if this 3rd party server crashes? How do you backup or more importantly restore your data when your disk fails? Do you know linux because that’s what most of these 3rd party music servers use (I used linux and Unix for decades in my work but this is not an OS for the computer/audiophile novice).
The music server people will tell you to use a nas which is fine but you will also need to back that up which requires another computer. I have swapped between different Mac computers depending on how I wanted to run things. I use an external drive for my data and my Roon backup and another external drive for my hourly backups. When I want to swap computers, I move the external disk with my data and Roon backup to the other Mac, point Roon to its backup, I restore Roon and a couple of minutes later, I’m back up and running. Try that with any 3rd party server