audio-talk

BlueSound Node2 with Tidal and Qobuz Hi-res subscriptions.... don't feel the need for anything else

...until, as Ant mentions, I get my TT up and running again...

Tidal through life membership Roon. sonicTransporter with ethernet direct into Devialet Expert 250 Pro Core Infinity. Also an RPi with linear PSU using squeezlite to stream Radio Paradise flac as it can’t be done through Roon at present.

Was using a Squeezebox SB3 running from a cobbled-together NAS with 400gb hard drive attached, mainly for background and family use but the family isn’t interested, and I found that although 400gb can hold more music than I’m ever going to need, I just ended up listening to the same old things over again. As a result, I recently took a subscription for Tidal and bought a Chromecast Audio. Brilliant, because I can listen to all those albums I nearly bought but didn’t, and I can try all those tracks that come up on “what are you listening to right now” without having to download, rescan and lose the will to live.
Both have always been second fiddle to vinyl though, because both lacked that vital indescribable third dimension that transforms hearing into listening and experiencing, so neither was used for serious listening.
The CCA sounds different from the SB3, being a bit livelier but at the same time a bit harder, sufficiently so for me to take a punt a couple of months ago on a Beresford 7210 for fifty quid off eBay.
That bloke Stan knows his stuff, doesn’t he? This is the least of his creations, but it produces all that organic, tactile quality that’s been missing from the digital experience. Suffice it to say that the TT2 has hardly turned a table since the Standac arrived.
It isn’t all wonderful though. Casting Tidal to the CCA from an iPhone is infuriating. Every time you start playing a new album it reverts back to playing from the phone, and loses the beginning of the first track as you re-select the CCA. Quite often it refuses to cast for no obvious reason, needing the app to be stopped and re-started, and every now and then it’s just plain bizarre. Playing Fairport’s Unhalfbricking today it flatly refused to play A Sailor’s Life, telling me that the track was not permitted for playback in my country. Bizarre.
So I’m now looking for a better, less flaky interface between Tidal and the DAC, be that a better app or a better alternative to the CCA. As ever though, budget is minimal.

Forgot to say, also a Roon and Tidal user. Haven’t tried Qobuz yet. How do they compare?

Quality of both is excellent. Qobuz has the 24/192 FLAC and Tidal has the MQA system which my BlueSound DAC supports. I tend to use Tidal all the time to be honest, but having both is good (Qobuz was bought for me) as there are a few titles that are not available on one and are on the other and vice versa, but both are excellent. If I had to keep one, it would be Tidal.

Heavily modded Oppo 203 into a PS Audio Directstream dac over i2s connection, Wireworld Platinum i2s cable.

Better than my vinyl rig...there, I said it!

I have some kit on order from EC Designs in The Netherlands.

They are the MOS16 Dac, UPL16 music player and the UTOS usb to optical converter.

The gear is battery powered charged by USB port. The music files are held on usb sticks in Wav format. The Dac has only tos link i/p.

https://www.ecdesigns.nl/en/info/faq
https://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital ... a-677.html

They say -
When converting digital audio data to an analogue signal we want to have lowest interference so we end up with the music and nothing but the music.

For this reason we use quiet discrete circuits and novel multibit D/A converters that maintain low interference levels. In order to maintain low interference levels in the analogue signal path, we use minimum signal attenuation in combination with variable gain on our monoblocks. Maximising signal amplitude and minimising gain results in highest SN ratio and lowest interference.

2011 MacMini, BitPerfect, Focusrite Forte ADC/DAC, separate “analog” USB Powersupply.

It could just be me, but Focusrite seems to have a magic hand on ADC/DAC transformation. For onsite recording I started with their Saffire range and now have tried many different models. Nothing ever appears that makes me doubt. Tried RME, Apogee, Wadia and others. I keep coming back.

Have you tried feeding the output of a cartridge into the mic input and doing RIAA in software?

I'm still using my streaming solution based on Squeezebox Receiver as "transport" connected to Pedja Rogic 1541S2 DAC via I2S + reclocker, feeding into Hawk Audio buffer amp board.

It has done me great service for the last 14 years!

I have left it alone and done nothing significant except for changing the reclocker about 3 years ago.

I only use Cd players. Heavily modified Naim CD3.5, Cambridge Audio CD5 and Sony CDPS1.

We have itunes on the pc but i very rarely bother with it. I am a keep it simple kind of guy. No external dac's, digital cables or anything.

Updated the PI to a 3+ a year back.
Also installed the Nanosound plugin so using an external DVD writer (for a computer) I can play CD's through it and sounds pretty good.

Old MacBook laptop running Daphile (temporary solution, to be replaced with DIY NUC powered with a linear power supply), into DacMagic, which is to be replaced with a Soekris DAC at some point.

We just wanted to get our music server up and running in some form sooner rather than later, so we could finally do away with the CD player.

My wife is doing a fine job of ripping CDs to the server with EAC. The above setup already sounds better than the CD player.

I have started a free trial of roon - just getting everything up and running at the moment.
I had a 2012 Mac mini that wasn't being used, so I've upgraded that with an SSD and a clean install of macOS, and am using that as the roon core.
So far so good, it has been pleasantly straight forward.
One question - is anyone streaming MQA from TIDAL? How does it sound?

I had a Tidal account. I didn’t like MQA. My observation was that the overall sound was disjointed and un-natural. I have abandoned Tidal for Qobuz which specialises in hi res recordings. Everything was much better sound wise after I made the switch. Qobuz has a smaller library but overall I think it is better. Having said that, I’m running through Roon for facilitation. Have to say, I’ll not be changing. I’ve bought lifetime membership to Roon and will happily pay the £350 annual fee to Qobuz when it comes around. Streaming an external catalogue offers so much opportunity to discover new music, or simply enables you to facilitate and play when a mate mentions a track you don’t hold in your library.

Having said all that, all I’m listening to at the moment is vinyl. With a Hana ML cartridge, an Audiomods Series 6 carbon fibre arm on my Denon DP-80 direct drive into an LDA (Nick Gorham) MCJ3 Hybrid Valve Phono Stage, the sound enjoyment is well better than anything streamed, and that opinion is shared by all my local group of mates who meet up for listening sessions.