[Antonmb]

Originally Posted by W9TR

There are a lot more variables to manage in a central storage and playback system than just spinning discs in a really good CD transport - with or without an outboard DAC.

For a lot of folks their CD spinner sounds better. Here's why.

The first thing you have to figure out is if your entire chain is bit-perfect. There are a number of ways to do this - the easiest is to encode a 5.1 channel DD or DTS audio source using your normal ripping process and then play it back from your streamer's digital output into a receiver or pre/pro that can decode DD or DTS. If the file it is bit-perfect throughout your entire chain then it will decode properly at the output of your streamer. If anything is amiss it won't.

If you have that base covered then you have to manage noise in your system. Your streamer may be connected via Ethernet, so you have to make sure there is no noise getting into it via that path. If it is WiFi, then you have the RF noise to deal with. You will want to make sure the RSSi of the WiFi path is robust so the streamer is using the minimum amount of RF power - this may mean relocating your WiFi access point or creating a dedicated subnet for it.

Once that is done, (maybe before), you need to make sure that your AC power is clean and that you are preventing AC noise from getting into or out of your streamer. To be fair this is also true of your disc spinner.

Then, if you are using an outboard DAC, you need to make sure that noise from the streamer is not getting into your DAC - cables matter here, as does the interface you use - be it USB or AES/EBU (recommended) or S/PDIF. Again, you have to do this with a disc spinner but there are fewer variables like Ethernet and WiFi to contend with.

There are other variables that come into hi-rez playback as well - like how you encode to FLAC if you use it, and how your streamer decodes hi-rez FLAC. The DD/DTS test I mentioned above cannot measure this.

Tom

Great post. There are certainly more complexities to achieving great streaming sound.