Why buy high end streaming equipment?

Streaming is a fast forward than Pre/powers/LPs/Cds thats for sure.... but even an old one like NDX goes a long time, you won't have DSD 256 or Roon but gets the job done with 16/44, maybe thats all you ever need.. 

For playing ripped CDs or high resolution files from an NAS?

I think it does depend on what sources you're using.

IRadio as you correctly say tends to max out at 320k mp3, which will be the limiting factor. (Although Radio Paradise now has the FLAC encoding previously trialled by the BBC, so that may become more common.)

The main 3 realtime streaming services, Qobuz, Tidal and Spotify now all have "CD quality", i.e.lossless streaming at 16/44, so if you have a good WAN connection to your home, they can be pretty good. In my experience I get good quality from Tidal after about 10pm and reasonable quality before,  which possibly relates to server load or network contention at my local exchange.

Then there's in-house streaming from a NAS/server, where the limit is the resolution of the file (and the original source quality, some 24/192 albums reputed sound poor because of the processing to get from the original lower-res file).

So depending on which of these streaming sources you use, you may find great value in high enbd kit, or tehn again you may not, 320k mp3 over a flaky DSL connection may well sound better on a very cheap system which hides the problems by being poor itself, where a set of well mastered 24/192 files from a NAS across a good home network will benefit massively from a high end renderer.

When I had a Brennan JB7 in my office, it was the discovery that ripping to WAV gave me music that sounded so much better than ripping to so-called HQ 320 Kbps MP3 that started me on the whole Naim journey.

Before that I had decided that my old ears wouldn't be able to hear the difference and when I discovered that not only could they but I massively preferred the lossless rip, the Brennan went to a new home with my elder daughter where it still lives lossily today, and I bought my first Naim box.

best

David

Eoink posted:

The main 3 realtime streaming services, Qobuz, Tidal and Spotify now all have "CD quality", i.e.lossless streaming at 16/44, so if you have a good WAN connection to your home, they can be pretty good. In my experience I get good quality from Tidal after about 10pm and reasonable quality before,  which possibly relates to server load or network contention at my local exchange.

Spotify "CD Quality"? Not in this part of the woods yet but patiently waiting.

Dave

dave4jazz posted:

Eoink posted:

The main 3 realtime streaming services, Qobuz, Tidal and Spotify now all have "CD quality", i.e.lossless streaming at 16/44, so if you have a good WAN connection to your home, they can be pretty good. In my experience I get good quality from Tidal after about 10pm and reasonable quality before,  which possibly relates to server load or network contention at my local exchange.

Spotify "CD Quality"? Not in this part of the woods yet but patiently waiting.

Dave

Ah, as a Tidal user, I vaguely noticed a Spotify FLAC annuncement earlier this year, didn't notice any caveats.

Eoink posted:

dave4jazz posted:

Eoink posted:

The main 3 realtime streaming services, Qobuz, Tidal and Spotify now all have "CD quality", i.e.lossless streaming at 16/44, so if you have a good WAN connection to your home, they can be pretty good. In my experience I get good quality from Tidal after about 10pm and reasonable quality before,  which possibly relates to server load or network contention at my local exchange.

Spotify "CD Quality"? Not in this part of the woods yet but patiently waiting.

Dave

Ah, as a Tidal user, I vaguely noticed a Spotify FLAC annuncement earlier this year, didn't notice any caveats.

My understanding is Spotify HiFi, i.e. CD quality, is currently being trialled. In fact my Vortexbox/Squeezebox Server setup shows my Spotify Premium (320kbps) account is streaming at 705kbps CBR Ogg Vorbis (Spotify) (converted to FLAC). And I didn't need to ask!

Dave

Consciousmess posted:

When most available stations are 320kb/s or less?  I know there is Tidal which is 1440kb/s or something, but that is CD and no doubt isn’t error free. Or flaw free.

Please elucidate as I discovered the radio on my HDX, but at 320kb/s it’s just something for background noise while the builders work.  But an NDS with 2x 555PS for 320kb/s is overkill when you can’t save stuff locally!! No doubt an NAS has flaws simply because of it NOT being local e.g. Ethernet, router issues.

The most compelling reason for me to use a high-end DAC is the quality of analogue out.

The more I dig into digital  music, the more I realise that its a very large can o’ worms. 

I bought a Mu So Qb to get a bit of experience with digital. So far I’ve found that 

Airplay is rubbish

Bluetooth is less irritating than Airplay 

Anything Related to wi-fi is rubbish

Anything based on 320 Bps is rubbish

CD quality streaming via wi-if is a WOT

Tidal 320bps is still a compressed homogenised, irritating mess. 

Saturday I was at a hi-fi show in Harrogate. Most exhibitors were playing digital files. Where any soundstage existed, it was entirely 2 dimensional.....left/right/ centre and the sound was always bound to a pair of speakers. Not a good intro to digital sound so far I’m afraid.

Blackmorec posted:

The more I dig into digital  music, the more I realise that its a very large can o’ worms. 

I bought a Mu So Qb to get a bit of experience with digital. So far I’ve found that 

Airplay is rubbish

Bluetooth is less irritating than Airplay 

Anything Related to wi-fi is rubbish

Anything based on 320 Bps is rubbish

CD quality streaming via wi-if is a WOT

Tidal 320bps is still a compressed homogenised, irritating mess. 

Saturday I was at a hi-fi show in Harrogate. Most exhibitors were playing digital files. Where any soundstage existed, it was entirely 2 dimensional.....left/right/ centre and the sound was always bound to a pair of speakers. Not a good intro to digital sound so far I’m afraid.

 

Perhaps I was lucky, and forgiving anyone's feelings about cables, one of the demos that made me consider a Melco was a Chord Cables demo using said Melco and Kef speakers. Two dimensional it was not.

Because it sounds d**n good playing LPCM streams (from WAVE files) from my NAS.

There's streaming, and streaming...

Streaming online, from radio stations mp3, or maybe even standard CD 16/44 from various sources but with a poor network connection, I would say there is little merit.

But streaming from a local source (NAS, computer, store/renderer) even at standard red book 16/44 resolution it can sound fantastic (and does in a system to do it justice). And higher resolutions are available. So the answer, for me, is that is why. 

However, perhaps I haven't answered the question, so to the OP, what are you defining as 'streaming equipment? E.g do you include the DAC, which equally is necessary in a CD system? And what do you mean by 'high end', for each item you count as 'streaming equipment?

Well, Innocent Bystander, the NDS was the prime equipment in mind. Yes I know the DAC is in the chain, but having surfed the radio web on my HDX, I couldn’t see the point of all these stations for high end equipment. I mean who pays several months salary to just hear background entertainment the building crew listen to? This led to the NDS as the present Naim pinnacle of streaming - without a hard drive like the HDX and FURTHERMORE I have good fibre optic internet like a lot of you do, but it is never totally free of problems and if one uses NAS it’s a bit like eating food with your fingers (local storage) or with chopsticks (NAS).

I find that streaming Qobuz at CD quality, for which read 600 - 1100 kb/s, can sound superb .....depending on the quality of the source file.

M

'Cose it sounds good - CDs, high res audio files. 

NAS setup is easy, as long as some logic and common sense is apllied. 

Consider it as a replacement for a high-end CD player... and consider the on-line streaming services and internet radio like a (almost free) built in tuner.

All this without having to store thousands of CDs in an accessible location or having to have an external tuner aerial to get a wider range of stations for 'background' music.

Blackmorec posted:

The more I dig into digital  music, the more I realise that its a very large can o’ worms. 

I bought a Mu So Qb to get a bit of experience with digital. So far I’ve found that 

Airplay is rubbish

Bluetooth is less irritating than Airplay 

Anything Related to wi-fi is rubbish

Anything based on 320 Bps is rubbish

CD quality streaming via wi-if is a WOT

Tidal 320bps is still a compressed homogenised, irritating mess. 

Saturday I was at a hi-fi show in Harrogate. Most exhibitors were playing digital files. Where any soundstage existed, it was entirely 2 dimensional.....left/right/ centre and the sound was always bound to a pair of speakers. Not a good intro to digital sound so far I’m afraid.

 

Nice though the MuSo Qb is (and I have one myself), it is not capable of delivering genuine hi-fidelity sound. It was designed for a specific purpose, and it delivers in respect of its design brief very well indeed? However, it is not appropriate to judge the sound it produces against a good quality analogue source, and it is absolutely not appropriate to dismiss digital music and digital replay equipment on the basis of your experiences with the MuSo Qb alone.

Your opinion might be respected a little more if you had given us some information about your (presumably) analogue based system against which you compared your MuSo Qb. I believe that I own a reasonably decent analogue source, and it does sound very good indeed to my ears. However my digital music playing source also sounds superb to my ears (even when using Tidal (CD Quality), and for the most part, equally as good as or sometimes better my turntable when playing the best CD quality or hi-res files from my local NAS..

Did you get to hear any analogue sources at the Harrogate show? Did they sound any better or could the lack of a 3d soundstage be down to something other than the use of digital files?

Many strange ideas here. Especially the post with all the rubbish rubbish rubbish and little else. Others seem to say that cd is almost acceptable but 24 bit is much better. Not always not even most of the time, but at least you have to pay more for highres files, and when a new highres format is put on the market the price of highres files goes up because this new fantastic highres files makes your standard cd collection sound like rubbish! Instead of staring on the bitrate and deciding that music is rubbish unless it is at a certain bitrate, you could try to use internet radio to discover new music. Then you can always buy or stream the music you like in lossless quality.

Claus

Local files streamed on the right kit can be excellent, on my system the difference between my vinyl and my local digital files comes down to the quality of the recording, both sound superb and I get the added benefit of convenience that streaming can offer. Tidal, streamed on the right platform can be good enough for serious listening and the masters are superb

Hmack posted:

Blackmorec posted:

The more I dig into digital  music, the more I realise that its a very large can o’ worms. 

I bought a Mu So Qb to get a bit of experience with digital. So far I’ve found that 

Airplay is rubbish

Bluetooth is less irritating than Airplay 

Anything Related to wi-fi is rubbish

Anything based on 320 Bps is rubbish

CD quality streaming via wi-if is a WOT

Tidal 320bps is still a compressed homogenised, irritating mess. 

Saturday I was at a hi-fi show in Harrogate. Most exhibitors were playing digital files. Where any soundstage existed, it was entirely 2 dimensional.....left/right/ centre and the sound was always bound to a pair of speakers. Not a good intro to digital sound so far I’m afraid.

 

Nice though the MuSo Qb is (and I have one myself), it is not capable of delivering genuine hi-fidelity sound. It was designed for a specific purpose, and it delivers in respect of its design brief very well indeed? However, it is not appropriate to judge the sound it produces against a good quality analogue source, and it is absolutely not appropriate to dismiss digital music and digital replay equipment on the basis of your experiences with the MuSo Qb alone.

Your opinion might be respected a little more if you had given us some information about your (presumably) analogue based system against which you compared your MuSo Qb. I believe that I own a reasonably decent analogue source, and it does sound very good indeed to my ears. However my digital music playing source also sounds superb to my ears (even when using Tidal (CD Quality), and for the most part, equally as good as or sometimes better my turntable when playing the best CD quality or hi-res files from my local NAS..

Did you get to hear any analogue sources at the Harrogate show? Did they sound any better or could the lack of a 3d soundstage be down to something other than the use of digital files?

Hi there,

I guess my post was incomplete....sorry for that.  The Mu-So Qb is good enough to differentiate a good source from a bad source. It doesn't do any of the real hi-fi stuff but it can be very enjoyable to listen to. The examples I gave in my post are not enjoyable....they are crap...they sound compressed, homogenized, harsh, irritating.  My point that I only incompletely made is that a lot of (but definitely not all) digital is crap.  Buying the Mu-So Qb is probably the best thing I could have done in order to learn what works and what doesn't.  So far I'm pretty clear that wi-fi, anything less than CD quality, Airplay and Bluetooth are rubbish, even for a simple little all-in-one system like the Mu-So.   Next I'm going to be trying Ethernet cabling, USB interfaces and Quboz CD Quality  to learn a little more.

My point...digital is a can of worms, due to all the formats, interfaces, operating systems etc. that simply sound awful.  When you get into digital there's no recipe to follow, just hundreds of different alternatives and combinations. Finding those that really work together to provide beautiful music is a hobby in itself, so it seems.

Regarding Harrogate, I encountered 2 turntables, one playing very strange music indeed and the other a 1970 era system that was so out of kilter I could see the tilt of the platter as I walked through the door "Wow...that's playing at a jaunty angle" was my opening greeting.  Most TT arms employ weight as bias compensation. This one employed an uphill gradient.

Blackmorec posted:

<snip>.  Most TT arms employ weight as bias compensation. This one employed an uphill gradient.

 

LOL    I love that, sheer brilliance! 

Huge posted:

Consider it as a replacement for a high-end CD player... and consider the on-line streaming services and internet radio like a (almost free) built in tuner.

All this without having to store thousands of CDs in an accessible location or having to have an external tuner aerial to get a wider range of stations for 'background' music.

This is my approach 1000%.  I did not want to store cd's, did not want them in my living room, did not want to have to search for the cd I wanted to listen to.  1600 cd's are stored on my little NAS box, lossless or better quality, all accessible on a track by track basis via my iPhone and the Naim App on either of my 2 hi fi systems.  What could be better??

Blackmorec posted:

My point...digital is a can of worms, due to all the formats, interfaces, operating systems etc. that simply sound awful.  When you get into digital there's no recipe to follow, just hundreds of different alternatives and combinations. Finding those that really work together to provide beautiful music is a hobby in itself, so it seems.

 

Not really.  You're WAY over-generalizing.

If you want hi fi, you need lossless.  All lossless formats pretty much sound the same, and you can convert one to the other if you prefer without any loss of quality.  Most stick to flac, or wav.  So that is TWO choices as to format.

Lossless files in flac or wav, and a $300 nas server, and a Naim player, and you've got true hi fi.  It couldn't be much simpler when I think about it.

Blackmorec posted:

The more I dig into digital  music, the more I realise that its a very large can o’ worms. 

I bought a Mu So Qb to get a bit of experience with digital. So far I’ve found that 

Airplay is rubbish

Bluetooth is less irritating than Airplay 

Anything Related to wi-fi is rubbish

Anything based on 320 Bps is rubbish

CD quality streaming via wi-if is a WOT

Tidal 320bps is still a compressed homogenised, irritating mess. 

Saturday I was at a hi-fi show in Harrogate. Most exhibitors were playing digital files. Where any soundstage existed, it was entirely 2 dimensional.....left/right/ centre and the sound was always bound to a pair of speakers. Not a good intro to digital sound so far I’m afraid.

 

You pretty much seem to have hit the nail right on the head there, Blackmorec.   The lesson to be learned here is obviously 'stay away from hifi shows in Harrogate'  (in fact I'd stay away from Harrogate, but that's a different story).

Luckily Bart has come to your rescue with a very sensible summary (above) of how simple and pleasing digital can be when you stay away from all those nasties you saw in Harrogate and do it properly 

I think what C wants us to discuss is if it matters what you play lossless files with.  Kind of like, if you cook with good ingredients, how much does the cooking process and technique really matter?

Nick