If you’re looking for an easy integration of CDs and streaming I’d recommend looking at the Innuos Zen or Zenith streamer/server as you can load all your CDs directly into it via its onboard CD transport and have all your streaming/physical music available in one place. Plus, their Sense app is free to manage your music and has gotten great reviews for sound quality, and their customer support is top notch. The thing is, most of your CDs are probably available on Qobuz (my preferred source), many times also available in hi-res, so you may find you don’t have to load all that many CDs into the Innuos, but it’s easy peasy if you need to with no need for external drives, etc. If you want great sound quality, ease of use and integrating your CDs, and customer support, the Innuos Zen or Zenith make for a very compelling option. Best of luck.
My audio system and streaming service are not yet on speaking terms. Help needed.
For 15 years I have enjoyed my primary home audio system to play a large CD collection that consists of jazz, rock, pop and classical, including some SACDs, using an OPPO BDP-95 as my player, Anthem electronic (AVM 20 and MCA 50), Paradigm Signature S2s on custom stands adjusted to my listening height and a Velodyne DD-15 in a room that allows for proper placement of the speakers and subwoofer along with decor that doubles as room treatment. It is hardly high end compared to some of the great systems some of you have assembled, but it has worked well for me, creating an immersive listening experience with a wide soundstage, clarity of placement of instruments and a balanced and naturally sounding output that is detailed but not harsh.
It's only been more recently that I turned to streaming services, first to stream in my vehicles, than through a pair of powered speakers set up in my home gym so I can more easily listen to music while I work out. I chose Tidal, enjoyed the quality of the sound and the ability to create playlists and explore deeper tracks or related artists, but I have not compared it yet to other streaming services. I have the Todal app on both my iPhone and iMac.
Then my Oppo conked out. While I do plan to try what might be a simple fix, with some emailed instructions from Oppo, I'd like to integrate my two systems, and am truly a newbie in that task.
I currently use an Eero Mesh server and will soon have the option to upgrade my home Internet to Fiberoptic as that infrastructure was just added to my neighborhood this past couple of weeks, with the connection to my home coming sometime later this month. My listening room is on the first floor, as is the room with my modem and router.
As for budget, while I don't have any real cap, I prefer to consider options in multiple price ranges, weighing marginal gains versus costs, before deciding. I would prefer to have the flexibility to transfer my disks to an external hard drive for ease of use. I have two 8 TB G-Technology external drives that I have long used to backup computer files, and store video that would consume too much space on my iMac drive, but lack the hardware to burn my CDs to those drives. So I have need for a music server or NAS drive in addition to a music streamer. My CD/SACD selection has been carefully acquired and curated by is hardly massive, no more than a thousand or so.
As I mentioned, I do enjoy creating and tweaking playlists, so would be open to trying ROON to compare its use to using Tidal directly. I'd also like the ability to share playlists, including with people who use a different streaming service than I do, as I get as much delight sharing music as listening to it, a byproduct of being in a band a long time ago.
So please do fire away with suggestions, issues to consider and your own experiences -- most of you have vastly more experience than I do, so I appreciate whatever you can share.
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@soix +1 |
Thanks @ghdprentice I live in Canada, which does not have access to Qobuz, but I may be able to still subscribe using a VPN. One of the first things I need to do is to see if that will work. |
@jonsher try searching Bill Charlap Trio. It comes up for me in both qobuz and tidal. As for sound quality I prefer Qobuz for the majority of my listening but there are some cases where the same album sounds better on Tidal. In other words, it depends. So here’s my $0.05 as fas as to roon or not… When to Roon - combination of the following: your music is ripped to a drive, you use one or more of the streaming services, your streamer does not come with a user friendly UI. You are running into blank artwork for your ripped albums and cannot live like that. I may have missed a use case for or against…so I’m sure other will jump in |
@soix -- thanks for the suggestion and rationale; definitely something for me to consider.
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