Play music from laptop over WiFi to existing audio system: how?


I want to play music from my laptop to my existing stereo system over WiFi instead of a USB cable. I find plenty of systems designed to stream music from the Internet but I'm not interested in that. I want to play the music from my laptop. I also find plenty of USB DAC's but I don't want to have a USB cable. I also don't favor Bluetooth because WiFi offers my bandwidth and options.
I looked at the Yamaha MusicCast WXC-50 and while I see that it can access files over the network using NFS (my preferred network file share protocol), it appears that in this case the laptop act as be a passive storage device. I am hoping instead to use the music player on my laptop to send music to my DAC/preamp as if it were connected by USB cable. But, of course, I want to do this wirelessly.
Is there a solution similar to what I am looking for?
lowoverdrive

Showing 1 response by mtraesbo

From my experience you have two routes depending of what it is you want to achieve. If you really mean that you want to play from your laptop to your hifi using wifi then products like Apple Airport can do the job. That is where I started. However, that means that your laptop or phone actually is playing the music, which is transferred to your HiFi. It eats battery and eventually your music stops if you for example see a video on Facebook.

A much better solution is using a streamer, which is connected to your router and your HiFi. In that case your laptop or phone is your remote control. You will need a streamer (transporter so to say) and a DAC that converts the digital signal to the analog amplifier. You will find solutions for this, which ranges from 100 to 10.000 $. 

A requirement for me was that the streamer could do Tidal - you need to consider if such is a requirement. 

I started off with a simple solution based on a Teufel streamer and a Musical Fidelity DAC. Total cost of 500 $. Recently I upgraded to Innous streamer and RME ADI-2 DAC. The intent still to stream Tidal, but use Roon as well. Total cost around 2.000 $.