2. digital
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I Sold my CD Player!!! Streaming sounds so incredible!!!

Several years ago, was the very first time I had the opportunity to hear a very high end, high quality, streaming audio system.  Once I heard it, I was smitten, and I knew right then and there that this was me all the way!!!  I was absolutely blown away by the handy convenience of the little iPad (or cell phone) used as remotes to control the otherworldly access to a virtual ocean of music via Tidal, Qobuz or downloads.  I immediately recognized this new technology as the future of my own audio system, especially with all the new hi rez stuff out there that was now made available. I gave up vinyl when CD came on the scene (yes, I'm an old guy), and, now, perhaps, it would be finally time to retire my beloved CD player.  Long story short:  What put my streaming audio system over the top, as far as sound quality is concerned, was the assemblage of these core streaming devices-----( #1) A superb DAC, by Ayre Acoustics QX-5 Twenty streaming DAC  (#2)  An outstanding music server, by Roon Nucleus Plus  (#3) An outstanding Audio Switch, by Pakedge Devices   (#4) Excellent Ethernet Cables, by Shunyata Sigma.  I also utilize numerous other tweaks and filters that further purify the streaming audio signal within my room and audio system.  At this juncture in life, I am just mesmerized by the combination of sound quality and convenience that I get through my streaming audio system.  I'm also happy and pleased to report that, I don't miss my old beloved CD player one bit.  Happy listening.              

kennymacc

Showing 3 responses by fpomposo

fpomposo
102 posts
 

I haven't played CDs in a long time, but I still buy CDs very often. 

I bought a Aurender N150 a couple years ago and it is excellent, but the reason I went with Aurender over Roon was the built in hard drive.

I have Qobuz and use it sometimes, but I mostly listen to my music library which is CDs ripped in WAV format onto the built in solid state hard drive. Streaming sounds pretty good and the Hi Res stuff is above the regular CD quality streams... BUT my ripped music library on the internal hard drive absolutely blows away anything on Qobuz... Often when I hear a new album or artist I discover on Qobuz I will buy the CD and add it to my collection..

fpomposo
102 posts
 

@carlsbad2 not sure what your getting at but your statement that there should be no discernable difference between local ripped files and streamed is incorrect.

When I listen to a CD at WAV resolution it’s anywhere from 500 to 800 megabytes of data, if you stream the same album it is going through lots of compression algorithms and you are downloading maybe 50 to 80 megabytes.

My local source file is traveling from the SSD hard drive in my Aurender a few inches to the USB output then to my DAC, when you stream a album it is going from a server farm somewhere in the world through thousands of miles of fiber and copper lines through multiple computers and devices in the chain of your ISP, then to your modem, then to your router, then another run of patch cord coppper cable and heavily compressed and decompressed many times along the way.

Proclaiming that they should have no discernable difference doesn’t make it so, it’s very very obvious by using the ear test that uncompressed local files are superior to Qobuz streamed music, and I will admit Qobuz sounds pretty good but not even close to local files on the HDD.

I recommend you get a streamer with onboard hard drive and hear for yourself , I love my Aurender but there are others that have onboard storage.

 

PS - My Aurender is hard wired, Aurender doesn’t even have Wi-Fi you can only hard wire it and I use a high quality shielded Cat7 patch cord to go to the double isolated LAN port on the Aurender. I do plan to get a audiophile network switch at some point and maybe try a audiophile expensive patch cord, but I haven’t spent the money on that just yet.

fpomposo
102 posts
 

@carlsbad it's not that I don't believe in flac or aac, I have half my music collection ripped in aac because many years ago I need to save disc space, so I have heard lots and lots of "lossless" audio, and I have  extensively compared albums in aac vs WAV and WAV sounds superior, again it's a drastic difference.

The entire point of flac and aac was saving space back in the day, but now there is no point, I have maybe 800 CDs ripped and it's under 1 TB, my Aurender has a 2 TB SSD hard drive in it, my computers all have 2 TB SSD, my entire library is backed up to Dropbox which I have a 6 TB limit. I have no use or need to try and save disc space by using "lossless" compression formats that actually sound much worse than just doing bit for bit copies of the original CD without ditching half the bits using flac or aac. 

 

 

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