Yeah. I stream Spotify and Tidal from Apple devices (iOS and MacOS). Tidal is sufficiently better than Spotify, to my ears, to merit the £19.99 a month. But neither is as good as the files I stream locally, which are so good that it was worth ripping thousands of CDs to it!
I suspect AirPlay may be the limiting factor as far as the external streaming sources are concerned.
Yes, I've previously owned both a Digi and Digi+. The + was a good increment over the standard Digi but I have to say the DigiOne is a significant step up again. It seems to benefit from the onboard multi-level PSU regulation (so that it's isolated from the noise generated by the Pi) and the re-clocking that gives a very low jitter output to the S/PDIF cable. Note there is no optical output.
Saying that, performance steps up again with a) using a battery PSU and b) setting the DAC to re-clock its inputs. Everything about optimising digital really helps the SQ, the opposite of 'bits are bits' thinking.
Thanks for all that, Martin. I had a feeling the DigiOne might be a good thing. Something to put on the buy list for when Christmas and VAT payments have passed ;-)
I'd go along with what you say about digital tweakery. There are lots of things that challenge 'bits are bits'. The one I'm playing with at the moment is whether uncompressed FLAC files sound better than compressed ones.
The answer? In a significant amount of cases. So all new downloads or CDs are ending up as uncompressed FLACs, and I'll be adding another hard drive to my NAS before uncompressing the existing files. I'll want to automate as much as possible of that little task!
That's interesting. The only thing I can think of is the overhead in CPU processing (noise, power consumption) involved in decompressing compressed files.
It is a strange one, but there is/was the long-running debate about whether WAVs sound better than FLACs. From my reading, an uncompressed FLAC is, as far as the music data is concerned, the same as a WAV.
One small change is the addition of a snap choke around the S/PDIF cable at the DAC end. A friend recommended I try it and there is a small gain in overall SQ. You cannot have too much noise and RFI removal.
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While I have a reasonable number of SACDs, the beauty of the Ayre is that it's an outstanding CD player too. So yes, it's in use all the time.
Mine streams from a NAS drive with all our music and a lot of our DVDs. The CDs are all packed away.
I don't bother with file-based playback as I love my CD/SACD collection.
I suspect AirPlay may be the limiting factor as far as the external streaming sources are concerned.
Edit: there are a lot of plugins for volumio that I haven't seen before.
Have you compared it to Digi+ Board I use?
Saying that, performance steps up again with a) using a battery PSU and b) setting the DAC to re-clock its inputs. Everything about optimising digital really helps the SQ, the opposite of 'bits are bits' thinking.
I'd go along with what you say about digital tweakery. There are lots of things that challenge 'bits are bits'. The one I'm playing with at the moment is whether uncompressed FLAC files sound better than compressed ones.
The answer? In a significant amount of cases. So all new downloads or CDs are ending up as uncompressed FLACs, and I'll be adding another hard drive to my NAS before uncompressing the existing files. I'll want to automate as much as possible of that little task!
If not, I'll have to track it down.