Cambridge Audio Azur 851N

Neither Spotify nor Amazon offer good quality streaming sound, with low bit rates...

I figured as much. But that's the future and seems the most cost effective way to listen to new and old songs.

I own a Classe CA-2200 amp. My goal is to get better dynamics out of digital music. The sound from Olive and Sonos is pretty dull and flat on most music. I may try some hi-res (DSD) downloads in near future. But for now, it's pretty much Spotify and Amazon.

Do you own a Azur or any other digital music player?

Thank you for your feedback.

I stream Tidal through a Sonos and outboard DAC and the sound is way better than Spotify

I do fair amount of streaming off Spotify and Amazon and got lot of music stored on my FAT32 USB drive.

Keep in mind that FAT32 is not a robust file system. For example, although it is unlikely you could lose all of the data on the drive if power were to drop out at the wrong instant while the drive is in use, and cause the file table to be corrupted.

Which makes it doubly important to have your music files well backed up, preferably on two additional drives, and with one of them preferably stored at a different location.

Also, if whatever the drive is connected to can work with a more robust file system, such as NTFS which can be used by Windows or an Ext3 or Ext4 file system which can be used by Linux, I would consider reformatting the drive to the more robust file system and then restoring the data to it from backups.

Regards,
-- Al