WiFi streaming — streamer vs. through iPad

@soix

The iFi Zen Stream is a great streamer, you will enjoy it. It does Wi-Fi very well, but I have mine hard wired and connected to an extender. But before that, the Wi-Fi worked great.

Now, to get the best sound quality, get yourself an external hard drive and load all your music on it, connect to the Stream via the USB port, and use the iFi app to play your music. This eliminates the need to use AirPlay, which is the biggest degradation in SQ. If you have Tidal, it also has Tidal Connect for best sound quality directly through the Tidal app.

If you use AirPlay, you are going to defeat the purpose of a dedicated streamer IMO.

Airplay is a very inferior transfer mechanism.

A high quality streamer will sound the same with stored files, CDs, vinyl albums, and better on higher resolution streamed files (Qobuz has 1/2 million high resolution albums). To achieve this, you simply need to choose the appropriate components.

Airplay is very compressed , but even mconnect  upnp app on apple devices is poorer quality than say bubble upnp on android as the signal gets processed via the apple device rather than handed off directly to the streamer ( but it's still way better than airplay. 

A streamer is going to give you a good lift in SQ.

100% avoid power line networks you do not want that noise in your mains.

Wi-Fi can be excellent if you have good coverage in your property but quite a few folks including myself find hard wiring Ethernet to be better , however I've got optical isolation and an Etherregen between my router and my stereo.

If you want to keep it simple and lower budget wifi is a good option and may well be better than Ethernet cable directly from router to streamer.

Get a good broadband bandwidth for the best experience with fewer dropouts.

good luck

My streaming took a substantial jump in quality when I got a dedicated streamer/DAC combo and relegated my PC to simply being the streamer/DAC's controller. As expected, sound quality went back to not-terrible-but-nothing-special when, just for kicks, I once again used my PC as the streamer/DAC.

I stream through a MacBook Pro usb into holo spring dac. One of the biggest sound improvements I made was to hard wire with cate6 to gigabyte switch. I will say the sound stage and bass came to life. I was very happy with the bass improvement as it is now tight and defined, the muddy thud was gone and you can now distinguish between an upright and a guitar. Wifi does work but no matter what you do wifi can only carry so much of the 1’s and 0’s. I am still going back and forth on going streamer only but have not. Part of my thought is that a streamer is just a dedicated computer and not sure how much it will change from my MacBook. I will upgrade my signal first going with the Small Green Computer fiber optic package. I stream Qobuz and internet radio mostly Austin Blues Radio direct from their web page.