Re: streaming recommendations for newbie

Follow up from 4/18,

’’@soix , yesterday I tried to handshake my phone to the Oppo, no dice. Did a google search & came up with an Oppo app for my droid. No dice there too. I can connect my Comp. via Cat 6 wire. I have an Creative sound card there. I’ll give that a try. I also tried the Comp. via bluetooth & didn’t like the SQ. I have to say that, using my phone to steam Tidal was better than the Comp via bluetooth.’’

The only way to connect my droid to the Oppo was to download Roon to my phone & eliminate my AVR via bluetooth. I’m still processing Roon via wifi to the Oppo, but I can’t make out if there’s a difference in SQ. So then I downloaded Roon to my Comp to see if there was any improvement in SQ. Again, I can’t desifier if it’s any better than Tidal alone. I’m going to give it a few more days & see if it’ll get any better.

I have a 14 day trial from Roon, I shall see.

@danmar123 Yeah, at this point I’d highly recommend getting a streamer rather than tying yourself in knots trying to get your phone to work.  It needn’t be a very expensive streamer, and your sound quality will improve significantly. 

If you're happy with using a computer, adding a  USB dac is easy. I like my Schiit Modi multibit. Using other streamers will have you using your phone as an interface. I use ifi zen stream. Very inexpensive ways to try out streaming.

Just bought a smls sd-9. It seems to be of good quality. It’s more a renderer than streamer, but works for me. Has an abundance of connection options and a screen, albeit, very small. You connect it to a dac of your choice, no dac built in.

Plus one for @2psyop suggestion to get Bluesound Node X and a Teddy Pardo external power supply.  If the combination is too rich for now, you could get the Node X now, and get the Teddy Pardo later as a reasonably priced upgrade path.  If the DAC in your Sim Audio CD player is accessible from coax or optical cable and it’s fairly good quality, you might be able to get away with getting and Node N130 instead of the Node X, and then the Pardo power supply would be within your budget now.  FYI, the Node N130 benefits greatly from using a high quality coax cable, at least in my system.  If that is the route you choose for connecting to your DAC, don’t scrimp there.

kn