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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 sbank

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sbank
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@soix 

So, let’s drill down a bit here.  I realize I need to go hard-wired to a good streamer, and it also makes sense I should upgrade my switch.  Can’t do both right now, so I’m guessing I should go with hardwired streamer first and then upgrade switch?  Or Optical Rendu?  Thoughts?

That's what I do now. Ripped all my discs to NAS and use wired ethernet to opticalRendu. That beats the microRendu I had previously by eliminating a lot of noise as described in many posts below. Even the microRendu crushed my MacMini w/Audirvana+ or Amarra because a low power specialized device with a good LPS is SO much quieter than a PC/Mac running many processes unrelated to audio playback. 

You don't have to go nuts ripping all disks at once...just start with your most frequently played and do a few each week while you're watching movies, etc. 

The mastering of what you've got on disc vs. what services stream is a mystery and huge rabbit hole. Your findings are no shocker. With rips to a NAS or SSD, clean wired ethernet and a decent streamer you should well be on your way. FWIW, Andrew at SGC recommended a $20 TP-Link switch that sounds very good at nominal cost. Just don't skimp on the power supply for your streamer/renderer; they make a huge difference in SQ. Cheers,

Spencer 

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