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Playing CDs sounds better than Qobuz — dammit

I’ve built a decent HeadFi rig over the past few months and am quite happy with it streaming Qobuz as a source via my iPad/iPhone.  I recently brought my CD player into the rig as there are some reference CDs I need that aren’t available on Qobuz.  Well, I made the mistake of playing some CDs and compared them to Qobuz, and in every case the CD sounds better — specifically a quieter background and more transparency overall.  I’ve got good cables from the dongle out of my iPad to the USB cable that runs to my DAC for streaming, so let’s leave cables out of the discussion for now because I think this goes deeper than that.  Needless to say I’m pretty disappointed right now because I’ve enjoyed not spinning discs over the past year or so and certainly don’t wanna go back to buying CDs again.  Ugh.

So, what I’m thinking is that streaming over WiFi through my iDevices may be the bottleneck.  IF that’s the case and I need to up my streaming game, what would be the cheapest way to go to overcome the bottleneck?  My thought is going hardwired (which I can do) to something like an iFi Stream or maybe a ProJect Streambox, but just wondering if that’d get it done?  Something else?  I need something pre-made and won’t wrestle with doing a Raspberry Pi with hats, etc. as I have no patience for configuring/troubleshooting tech.  Thanks for any advice/thoughts. 

soix

Showing 1 response by pjb255livecom

pjb255livecom
28 posts
 

There's an additional factor accounting for (most if not all of) the SQ difference that's not be considered, which is the RFI and EMI noise traveling with the bits that 

     1) alter the timing of the bits arriving at the streamer/DAC (i.e. jitter)

     2) enter the DAC (along with the bits) and contaminates the DAC's analog

         stages

Introducing an audiophile switch (like the Uptone EtherREGEN or better), and upgrading the ethernet cables (Supra Cat8 or better) from the cable modem to the streamer/DAC will yield DRAMATIC improvements in all SQ aspects. 

These upgrades effectively eliminated the delta in SQ in my system.

 

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