Keep wife happy with Bluesound Vault with Ipad?

Get a divorce.

"01-05-14: Roxy54
Get a divorce."

Great advice. But before you file, buy your equipment first and hide it a storage facility until its all over. Less assets for her to end up with.

I had an 850 and don't remember it having a fibre optic connection. Was it upgraded? Also, is the FO Toslink or AT&T? If its AT&T, you may have compatibility issues.

No need to divorce. The system will be used primarily for parties when critical listening is nill. At smaller gatherings I can stil use my system with a CD. The Wadia 850x was not upgrated and has a glass fiber optical that is not specified as FO or At&T. It also has aes/ebu xlr as well as bnc and toslink. I am just wondering if the system will sound like some of the pathetic sonus setups I hear at parties.

It looks like you have both. If one is a Toslink, than the other one has to be AT&T (Sometimes it is called ST Type Glass). Its better than Toslink but is not widely used.

Based on the experience of friends and family, I can tell you that it would be less expensive to integrate your big rig w a way better than average whole house system than it would be to get a divorce.

The Bluesound is just one possible solution for network music.

I currently have the Lumin music streamer and it is amazing, you could easily upgrade the sound of your digital in a big way by swapping the Wadia for the Lumin. You can store all your cd's on a NAS and then play the files in any room you want via a DLNA/UPNP streaming device.

For the room without anything you can use a Naim Uniqute which is really fantastic. In this way you can have an app to control either device.

Just get a Mac Mini and add an external RAID1 firewire hard disk for your music tracks. Rip CD's using dbpoweramp on a PC or XLD on Mac. Other tips:

http://www.empiricalaudio.com/computer-audio/

Then get a Sonos for each room in the house, reclocked with a Synchro-Mesh. Each room would have either a DAC or a Sonos amplifier or amp/speaker.

for your Wadia:

http://www.sonos.com/shop/products/connect
plus
http://www.empiricalaudio.com/products/synchro-mesh

For your other rooms:

http://www.sonos.com/shop/products/connectamp

http://www.sonos.com/shop/products/play5

I guarantee it will sound better than any of these so called "audiophile" systems. For your Wadia, drive it with a Sonos to Synchro-Mesh reclocker powered by a Dynamo power supply feeding a BNC-BNC cable to your DAC. There is not a server on the planet that will beat this. Truly world-class digital source. You will be limited to 44.1 however.

Then you can go wired or wireless WiFi to the other Sonos end-points in the house. Each can play the same music or each can play different music. Sonos is the standard for WiFi playback worldwide. It just works and the playback software is easy to use. You can use a PC or a Mac, does not matter. Sound quality is identical. Playback software is identical.

Everything can be controlled by iPad or iPhone/iPod.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio