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YouTube / YouTube Music Streaming

Lets face it, I listen to more music, videos, shows, concerts on YouTube than I listen to music on streaming services such as Tidal or Qobuz.  Streaming services are great for published music on cds, but they are missing a lot of stuff that I enjoy. Im looking for input on what setup brings the highest fidelity from streaming on Youtube from a TV set.

I currently use a TV's optical toslink out to my dac which is a May KTE which has a good PLL circuit to lock onto the optical spdif signal.  It sounds good, very good infact and something I could live with but I wanted to know if there is anything thing else that can be added in the chain or a different method of streaming that can improve things even further.  

Ive tried a Remedy Reclocker that Ive had for about 10 years.  It takes the 48khz signal and upsamples it to 96khz using a pretty good clock but im this case, it made the sound worse and also destroyed the 3d sound stage.

Ive tried streaming from a Primare NP5 MK2 from casting from my phone and the sound quality was even lower.  

Im looking at the Denafraps Gaia reclocker and it maybe something that I can try since it can take an optical toslink as an input and convert that to I2S.  Im afraid that it may not be that much better or even a downgrade because the PLL circuit of the May is very good.

I looked into the HifiRose streamers and they have something called RoseTube but it only contains select videos and is missing a lot.

There are some Chinese audiophile streamers such as Eversolo which got good reviews but again I dont know how well they perform when taking optical toslink as input and outputting USB or I2S. 

Ive tried Laptop/Computers using Windows to stream but they never sounded natural to me as dedicated hardware. Plus its something I dont want to mess with because Im spoiled where I can just turn on a few things and within 5s be streaming.

Any ideas on what would be the ultimate way to stream Youtube to get the best sound possible?  Please be kind in your responses.  This isnt a discussion about YouTube being poor sounding when compared to other services.  

 

 

audioman2015

Showing 1 response by yage

yage
400 posts
 

I have an Android phone and use BubbleUPnP to stream YouTube / YouTube Music to my Raspberry Pi 4 B running moOde. The Pi is connected to my DAC via USB.

 

To set everything up, you first need to have a streamer that can act as a UPnP renderer. This will be the destination for the stream that you cast from your phone. Then you need to open up BubbleUPnP and select the streamer from your list of renderers (it should auto-populate). Finally, when using YouTube or YouTube Music, tap on the three dots next to the video or music selection you want to hear and select ’Share’, then pick BubbleUPnP from the list that appears. This will start the stream from your phone to the renderer.

 

Here’s a nice explanation from Cambridge Audio if all this is a little confusing - https://www.cambridgeaudio.com/row/en/blog/what-upnp

 

Positives are that this method gets rid of any ads. Downsides are that if you try to stream a playlist, BubbleUPnP seems to buffer each song in the list before playback starts so it can be a while (perhaps a half minute or more) before you hear music.

 

I can also use AirPlay to cast from an iOS device to my streamer, but it doesn’t strip out any ads.

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