Thoughts and suggestions please

“Bluesound will not honor the warranty on a Node if you use anything other than their power supply.”  This is correct, if they actually bother to check that you opened the box.  But for me, the low initial entry cost of their devices generally and the performance gain make the risk/reward calculation an easy decision.  Just make sure you get a quality after market power supply that provides adequate current and the correct voltage - and hope your streamer wasn’t a factory lemon.

The Node Icon supposedly has a beefier built-in switching power supply, commensurate with greater cost.  But replacement supplies are available from Teddy Pardo and others for it as well.  For this pricier Node, the financial risk is of course higher, and I do not have any experience with it, but the sound quality reward for replacing the stock supply in the N130 for me was high.

Adding a power supply with a switch also has the advantage of saving electricity, reducing your power use (however for replaced switching supplies this is small), reducing the number of lights glaring from your rack when not listening to digital music, and reducing the potential electrical fields and interference in your rack if you also have a vinyl setup.  For serious listening, I turn everything off in my rack except for the source I am using at that moment.

kn
 

@goodlistening64

Thanks for sharing that experience.  I have compared a coax (pricy The Chord Company Signature Super ARAY - from the N130) with good DHLabs USB (from computer) and toslink (from the N130) cables with Qutest.  In my system the result to my ear was coax>USB>toslink, but the difference was a bit disappointingly small given the much higher cost of the coax cable I am using, even purchased used.  Nevertheless, in my system and with my equipment, coax is slightly better sounding, and I put that down to the Qutest excellent jitter handling capabilities and the terrifically quiet Chord Company coax cable I am using.  I tried a bunch of different cables, and there is a big and noticeable range of performance among them.

With my older Chord QuteHD DAC, USB from the computer sounded better - but that was before the power supply upgrade for the Node N130 - go figure.  FWIW, I seem to recall Rob Watts, the designer of the Qutest, recommends using toslink with that DAC, but that might just be an Internet rumor.

YMMV,

kn

The Chord should handle the timing, but Blue sound suggest COAX if there is a question of driver support preventing that. Using Coax and investigating whether you are getting asynchronous in the BlueOS app should be obvious.

You are not getting asynchronous via the USB-C output, but I would think you should be getting it via streaming. Don't mean to confuse the two. 

If it sounds better via COAX then I would assume you are.