Bluesound vault 2

I'm afraid I have no useful experience of Bluesound gear to share with you, but I am intrigued by their sources. I have a friend who doesn't want to spend Naim money, but is interested in a streamer, and thought this should be on his shortlist, so I'd be interested hearing other people's experiences too.

Do you have other Bluesound devices in your house? These multiroom systems are proprietary, and you would need Bluesound players (Nodes?) elsewhere in your house for it to be compatible with the Vault. The same would be the case with other multiroom players such as those from Naim, Sonos, Yamaha etc. 

Hi, thanks. I don’t have any other bluesound kit. I’m just looking to ideally get a single piece of kit that I can rip a lot of cds to and input these directly into my SN 1 for best quality playback. Second to that I would like this source to be able to stream to WiFi speakers elsewhere in house where sound quality is not a priority. 

I haven’t tried Bluesound — so can’t really comment on this kit. But, since you have a SN1 with DAC, you might just do fine with Innuos Zen Mini — less redundancy... 

A Zen Mini could be another option, but I don't think the USB output wouldn't work into a Supernait - you could probably do it with a USB to SPDIF converter. (There have been rumours that Innuos will add an SPDIF output, but it hasn't happened yet.) 

Thanks Timo, does that stream as well?

Apparently the Zen mini that will be launched late summer will have more connectivity

Andy Widd posted:

Thanks Timo, does that stream as well?

It's a UPnP server, so if your players around the house are streamers, it would be usable with them. The USB output would also  work directly into a USB DAC.

Indeed, Zen Mini Mk 3 will come with optical and coaxial SPDIF digital outputs — a good solution if one doesn’t need the DAC in the Bluesound Product, I think.

Lovely thank you everyone. Zen mini or zen mk3 it is.

the new zen mini MK£ is £200?? more

Although not exactly the same product but very similar, I did try a Bluesound Node 2 at the end of a 272N via both a digital and analogue connection. In my case it was to use it as a Roon endpoint and compare it to a Allo Digione Player. 

For digital hookup, I used a coaxial cable from the Bluesound to a digital input on the N272, thus bypassing the internal DAC of the Node 2. For the analogue demo, I used a modest pair of RCA interconnect cables to an analogue input on the N272, which uses the internal DAC of the Node 2. In both cases, I tired both a wired and wireless setup and both were stable even with hi res material. No dropouts.

As I expected, the digital connection provided better sonic results at the end of a 272/555PS but the internal DAC of this versatile  network player was surprisingly good. For less than $600 (Canadian) in our parts of the woods. It actually features lots of functionality such as Airplay, MQA (Tidal Masters), Roon ready, integration of many streaming services, Bluetooth, hi-res audio, etc, makes this more than just an entry level streamer, in my opinion. 

From a setup standpoint, it was fairly simple to have it see the NAS drives, login to the various music streaming services. The only  tricky part is adding a network share, which requires setting up file sharing. Not a deal breaker if you plan on using a Vault 2 and storing all the music internally. 

Although I did not spend too much time using it, the iOS app seemed pretty friendly and this aspect is one of the more important features when searching a local music library or online streaming service. You want the experience to be pleasant and easy.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for that Rightcoastants. 

I think I’m going to get a M2 tech hiface 2 usb/ spdif converter along with either a zen mini or zen. Any thoughts on the M2 tech hiface 2 anyone or are old threads available- I can’t find any on this one.