new to streaming- help!

Keep at it, the bluesound NODE is an excellent piece of equipment and the bluos app is as reliable as it gets. When I started with bluesound streaming I had plenty of difficulties to wrap my head around but with patience I got rewarded.

I agree with above post to dump Tidal and get Qobuz. Also, if possible just avoid Wi-Fi completely and go hardwired, and in addition to working better it’ll sound better as well. If it’s inconvenient to run a cable from the router to your Node you can get a Wi-Fi extender from TP Link, etc. (buy local or from Amazon so you can return it you still have issues) and run an Ethernet cable from that to your Node. That’s what I’d do if you can’t or prefer not to run direct from the router. Hope this helps somewhat.

@styleman I’d also highly recommend you get a dedicated streamer and buy either a Wi-Fi extender or a Mesh system so you can easily run an Ethernet cable from that to the streamer. Both work very well and provide much better performance than going over Wi-Fi with no cable. Some prefer Mesh as they think it sounds better and may work better if your system is a good distance from your router with the downside being it’s a little more expensive, but not all that much by audio standards. Again, hope this helps, and best of luck.

I know most of the people posting here indicate that streaming from a PC is bad for audio quality. Mostly due to space constraints, I am using a PC as a streaming source. It was clearly a sub-par source until I bought a Jitter filter. Made a huge difference in sound. I also have everything running via cables, ethernet to PC, USB to external DAC with a USB input. Bluetooth and WIFI are great when there are no hard wired options.

I know most of the people posting here indicate that streaming from a PC is bad for audio quality. Mostly due to space constraints

@motown-l No, it has almost nothing to do with space constraints and everything to do with sound quality.  Computers are multi-use devices that, unlike streamers, are not optimized at all for playing music and are very noisy.  Noise is the mortal enemy when it comes to streaming, which is a major reason why computers suck as a streaming source.  Treating jitter helps, but you’re still left with the noise.  Get a streamer, even a cheaper one like Wii, Node, etc., and you’ll realize this immediately as the difference is not subtle if you have an otherwise decent system.

Margot, I would start by taking Wi-Fi out of the equation. If you plug both the Node and your MacBook into Ethernet, can you see the Node when you run the Bluesound app on your MacBook?