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

Streaming is probably the first time I started looking at all what some call snake oil. After I put the Sonore Rendu and decoupled the network from the system and added a really good DAC wow.   There is noise out there. I have not dove into the $2000 usb and hdmi (for I2S) cables as I really have never noticed big things there. But streaming both from streaming service and ripped CDs and SACDs is absolutely amazing with an incredibly low noise floor. Just super clean music.  And so much more fun jumping around to different music with just your finger. Done right streaming is just as good as discs. 

Hi, I use Wolf Audio and couldn’t be happier, it is linked to my T+A DAC 8 which is is a fabulous dual channel DAC. Check them out, link below.

 

@soix 

 

Have you upgraded your streamer yet? If you did, which one did you end up going with? You should highly consider Naim or Linn streamers. Aurender, Lumin, T&A, EMM Labs, Playback Design also make great sounding streamers / DAC. 

@dilatante Thanks for asking.  I ended up getting an iFi Zen Stream with their iPowerX power supply and it provided a huge improvement.  If I upgrade from the Zen it’ll likely be to an Innuos Zen so I can load my CDs that aren’t available to stream into it, and I like their Sense app that gets great reviews for both sound quality and usability.