[Closed] I just put on a CD and it sounded incredible. Fix my streaming…

Possibly this? Wiim mini.

No personal experience but seems popular though hard to get at the moment. The Chromecast,TV thing does sound cumbersome but I'd have thought that the data to the dac would have been the same.

Iirc the guy in the link above might have done a video discussing the various streaming platforms. I don't think it amounted to much of a difference.

Your last comment is what I do - a raspberry pi with Justboom digital out ‘hat’ constantly on and running Volumio software.

This allows me to airplay from any device to the Pi and out into the amp digitally (Arcam SR250 with decent built in dac)

Also have iPad through camera kit and out to usb to coax Xmos based converter and then into amp digitally again.

iPad uses Amazon HD and streams Apple lossless versions of our cd collection.

Only a few weeks ago decided to get the CD player out - Arcam CD73T. Sounded good but tbh it wasn’t any different to the above digital audio and far less convenient.

Once set up and left, the Rpi has been faultless and has the benefit of radio etc when needed.

I’ve not used Spotify but maybe you could airplay it to a Pi. Make sure you set all apps to the highest quality streaming, as most default to relatively low quality which will almost certainly not be as good as cd.

Chromecast Audio?

Looks like trying a digital out hat is going to be a cheap way to experiment, at the very least. I’ll report on results. If there’s no improvement I’ll have to revisit the old lossless debate and try a different streaming service.

But I’m astounded that me (Lapsed hifi enthusiast but grounded by also being an electronic engineer so ignores the hifi bull****) and the mrs have been stunned by how different it sounds. Lows are lower, highs are sweeter, quiet bits are quieter, dynamics are more dynamic. Ok I sound like the hifi magazines I used to read now, but it just makes you want to listen to music. Worth getting this right.

Chromecast Audio?

Does that give a digital out directly? Just googling it myself…

Chromecast Audio?
Does that give a digital out directly? Just googling it myself…

Answering my own question: it does.
Hmm. That might win all the convenience points. But at £70 I have to risk that I still can’t actually tell if chromecast delivers Spotify at its highest bitrate despite googling. Still, less time expended than messing round with a rPi.

I have a Yamaha WXAD10 Wireless Streaming thingee.
No longer available but something similar must exist.

I "cast" from my phone to the device and then into the Hifi.

Sounds a lot better than the old Chromecast - TV - Hifi setup I used to run.
I tried various Raspberry Pi solutions but it was always a faff.

Nothing weird going on with the current Chromecast or the TV? Does it have settings to cap throughput quality, or isn't set to bitstream PCM?

Sounds a lot better than the old Chromecast – TV – Hifi setup I used to run.

Encouraging. There’s a few too many opportunities for someone (chromecast? Tv?) to do something in my current streaming setup to the audio signal that isn’t optimal for the audio signal, because they have other priorities.

Nothing weird going on with the current Chromecast or the TV? Does it have settings to cap throughput quality, or isn’t set to bitstream PCM?

Yep, good point, I’ve been through the telly settings, it’s straight pcm through as far as the telly tells me. and the chromecast settings… there are none. Spotify app set to max but not sure if this is reflected in the chromecast.

Thanks to all of you, you’ve given my confidence to try something else with a modest outlay, should deliver an improvement.

Tidal through a DAC into a hifi. Sounds the same as CD through the same DAC. It’s a Cambridge Dacmagic 100 and they have a store on eBay for returns for a discount.

DACs have moved on a long way. But what’s the bitrate from Spotify? Tidal is CD lossless. It’s demonstrably better than the Spotify stream of the same track. And Deezer, although the hifi Deezer is also fine.

Spotify to Chromecast audio and a Yamaha amp and to my 60 years old ears sounds 👍

Sorry guys, CD’s stuck on a scratch. Back in a min.

Tidal through a DAC into a hifi. Sounds the same as CD through the same DAC.

Spotify to Chromecast audio and a Yamaha amp and to my 60 years old ears sounds

More confirmation of my initial suspicion that streaming should sound more or less as good as my cds. If I don’t quite get there with new hardware I’ll definitely try moving to tidal for lossless.

Gonna stick massive attack - blue lines on now.

The rpi being a faff to use is not valid tbh. I hate faff and simply won’t mess about for long.

Getting the pi ready was a simple download to memory card, plug in the pi and configure its settings - done.

No messing with coding or anything. 10 minutes tops.

Tried a Chromecast ages ago but it didn’t support gapless playback, making it no good for my music with a lot of it being DJ mixes.

Tidal streamed from a 2012 MBP with optical out of the 3.5mm socket to the DAC. CD is also digital out to same DAC. I’ve also streamed a slightly higher rate via USB from my W10 laptop to the same DAC (I chose it really as a switching device between work Teams and personal Zooms into the hifi). Again no difference. I’ve not sent Bluetooth from the phone as there will be degraded signal compression.

Tidal is great.

I use an Echo Link directly into my power amps via inline attenuators to get the level right. Coupled with a HD streaming sub it's outstanding in my view. A bit less warm than my CD player but much more detailed. I think they work with Spotify as well. The Echo Link Plus includes an amp, which was not reviewed well but the criticisms relate to the amp itself - however the regular Echo Link is just a streamer.

I think I’ve still got a Chromecast Audio sitting unloved in a cupboard, message me if you’re interested, it’ll be cheap 🙂

I have a Yamaha WXAD10 Wireless Streaming thingee.
No longer available but something similar must exist.

I “cast” from my phone to the device and then into the Hifi

I assume that the quotes around the cast are to take account of the fact that you tell the Yamaha controller what you want to play from the MusicCast phone app and the controller takes it from there.
OP If you're using bluetooth or similar to send music to the hifi that can have an effect on the sound quality. You're looking for a Spotify player that is plugged into your router with a quality on-board/separate DAC.

That Yamqha device above is great. Its controlled by your phone, but with streaming is either wifi or ethernet cable. Its a good addition to an older hifi i think.

Ian

The problem is Spotify. Grab a free trial of Tidal or Apple Music (doesn't need an iPhone) and you'll hear the difference straight away.

Chromecast to your amp via optical pretty much solves the DAC problems. If you can get decent sound from a CD, you've already got a good DAC.

As well as all the above, Spotify does not have the best sound quality - by design I might add.
Perhaps worth giving a free trial of Qobuz or Tidal a go and see if that helps also.

Apologies - just re-read your OP and seen your comment re: bitrates etc. I would still give it a go. Whilst I would not profess to be able to hear the difference between Red Book CD quality and Hi-Res I can easily tell the difference between lossy Spotify and lossless Qobuz. It isn't even close. Ditto MP3 and FLAC.

I think I’ve still got a Chromecast Audio sitting unloved in a cupboard, message me if you’re interested, it’ll be cheap 🙂

Pm sent!

Moving to a chromecast audio will nicely eliminate the tv from the audio chain, which I suspect will help, even though it’s a digital chain I’m sure there’s some reclocking and “bad things” happening in that signal chain.

And responding to the more recent contributors, trialling a high resolution streaming service is definitely on the cards. I’ll report on my results!

I've used CHromecast Audio for years and it is great. However, it appears to no longer be supported properly. I used to be able to go into the settings and do things like set it to full dynamic range (sounded awful without this on my hifi) and turn off playback sounds as in the link below. However, the only settings I now seem to have access to are bass & treble?

https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/6290498?hl=en-GB&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid

As above, I'm very happy with Qobuz or Tidal (I've settled on the former for their curations and integration with Roon) streaming through a Bluesound Node - my CD player hasn't really been used for a long time now, a stupidly expensive relic on a rack...

Problems in order of effect:

Depending on TV it could be pushing through DA - AD to give you an optical out. It likely has a terrible DAC.

Chrome cast has a setting to enable High Res from trialling it a while back. Out of the box it won’t be. It’s called something totally innocuous and is not intuitive. Even when this is solved Chromecast isn’t perfect in comparison to a high end streamer.

Spotify sounds notably worse even in its high res mode that is really just 320. Test out Qobuz with your setup once you’ve sorted the above. For me it beats Tidal as you don’t need a fancy DAC with MQA to go full HD.

Your setup will cost a stupid amount of money to beat today taking into account inflation. The X-A1 is very transparent and will highlight both poor quality recordings that no streaming service can solve, in addition to poor quality input. Make sure you are testing the same song from the same album. Even in 24bit audio if the album was mastered poorly it will still sound crap. Newer versions of old albums are often remastered and compressed to sound better with headphones. Even Spotify will feature multiple versions of the same album but can be hard to tell which.

Rasp Pi into your chosen DAC is decent option.

@simondbarnes

Try "Device features" -Audio.

Full Dynamic is in there, though, the new interface/options are a bit poor, might have to switch to a rPi if it gets any more limited!

Also, if you're still only seeing limited features, you might need to reboot/reconnect.

In my home office I use a first generation Sonos Connect for Spotify and radio duties. They're around £50 on ebay.

Edited to add: to my untrained ears I can't tell the difference between spotify/CD/NAS

I think I’ve still got a Chromecast Audio sitting unloved in a cupboard, message me if you’re interested, it’ll be cheap 🙂

I bought 4 or 5 of them when they discontinued them, they were on sale as "end of line" at our local electronics warehouse place, about 18 quid each, made a tidy profit when they started appearing on ebay etc.

BTW to the OP, is there anyway you can test without connecting your chromecast via the telly? Just run it straight into the DAC.

I've got dedicated Chromecasts (or rPI running Volumio) for each device and on 320kbps it's *almost* indistinguishable from CD. (If i want indistinguishable i pull music from the server which is stored losslessly.)

Hey there - hope I can add something useful to this thread.

There are two broad reasons why your current streaming experience sounds considerably worse than a red book CD. One is that streaming is still an inferior way to replay music than having the media stored locally, whether that local storage be red book CD or a downloaded 44/16 or higher copy. This hold true in all instances I’ve tested so far - a downloaded version of the same album sounds better than the streamed version; not by much but the difference is definitely there. Then of course you have the fact that, at this time, Spotify is not even close to 44/16 resolution BUT they are about to launch just such a service.

The second reason is that the equipment you use to receive, organise and then pass the media to your DAC for decoding makes a huge difference. At the moment you’re using equipment not designed for the job to stream to your DAC; it will work, but comparing this set up to the CD player is a bit like wondering why an sports saloon car doesn’t perform as well on track as track car.

You need a dedicated music sever/streamer if what you want is something that will compete with the CD player you have; it doesn’t have to cost a fortune, but if you think about it, you've got an excellent transport currently performing the duties of data retrieval for red book CD and then a phone and telly doing it for streaming.

When I put together my HiFi last year, the last piece I had delivered was the music server. Before that, I was using my MBP with Roon. I was not anticipating the server making that much difference but I could not have been more wrong. The inclusion of a dedicated server was a huge jump (yes, OK it was a reasonably expensive server at £5k but still the improvement was astounding).

The other thing to highlight is Roon, which as a user experience for music is second to none. That platform does not have any of it’s own music content (but it does have extensive libraries of information which is what makes it such a rich experience), so you need to integrate it with a streaming service such as Tidal or Qobuz. I use the latter because you can get a lot of super high res media through it, up to an including DSD material, which will blow you away if you can indeed play it through your DAC (not all DACs can handle the files).

So my recommendation would be as follows:

- Look to get a dedicated music server, perhaps something like a Roon Nucleus which will also allow you to run Roon in your system
- Subscribe to either Tidal or Qobuz for high res streaming
- Look to buy and download local copies of media for the stuff you really like and treat having your own copy as being just like buying CDs was back in the day.

Hope this helps. Happy to answer any more questions.

One is that streaming is still an inferior way to replay music than having the media stored locally

Not sure if this is necessarily the case. Digital music is a stream of bits, it doesn't actually matter if that stream is being read off a CD and decoded in the CD player, or if it's being beamed over the internet and decoded in a streaming unit as long as the stream of bits is the same. If you have a HD music streaming service, then it will be - at least that's what they advertise. In many cases, as an Amazon HD music subscriber, the bit stream is higher resolution than what would be on a CD. If, however, you are using what they call 'SD' audio then it's compressed, which can sound worse (but this is a debatable topic).

A quick search suggests Spotify are promising to release 'Spotify Hifi' but this hasn't happened yet. So you're listening to compressed audio via a number of hops - and it's not quite clear what all those steps are doing in your setup although on the face of it they shouldn't matter.

Also, re compressed vs uncompressed - it's quite a subtle thing. In a test where you switch from one to the other, you might not notice, but I have found that over hours or days you start to be able to tell the difference. When Amazon Music got confused and started streaming me SD audio one time, I could tell straight away.

Spotify connect on phone ->chromecast->hdmi to telly->optical to the tag mclaren dac.

From the OP, this bit jumps out for several reasons. Spotify's own specs say its quality depends on your network connection, but ranges from 24kb/s (low) to 96kb/s (normal) and 160kb/s (high quality). That's not a great starting point, it has to be said.
From there, the sheer number of connections is a little concerning (perhaps wrongly).

My own setup is/ would be: Sonos Connect, hardwired to your router on one side, digital out to the DAC on the other. Then use Spotify on the Sonos, or (my preference) rip your CDs to the highest quality format you can (FLAC, or even WAV) on a NAS or spare computer. Hardwire that to your router, and play your music that way.
It's a bit of an investment, but gives the most flexibility and, in my semi-experienced, uh, experience, allows you to get as close as possible to CD quality.

I'll get slated by the audiophile mob for this - but try running some sort of equaliser software on your phone first before chucking ££££ at the problem.

I run Boom on my MacBook and it really does help.

Not sure if this is necessarily the case. Digital music is a stream of bits, it doesn’t actually matter if that stream is being read off a CD and decoded in the CD player, or if it’s being beamed over the internet

It's a fair point but the difference between streaming and local playback is error correction (with locally stored media the error correction process can be done more effectively) and noise, streaming being subject to more noise than locally stored.

The difference is subtle I agree, but it's definitely there, all other things being equal.

noise, streaming being subject to more noise than locally stored.

I'm going to question this. How does noise come into internet streaming? Spotify and others apparently use TCP which wouldn't be susceptible to missed bytes in the same way that there aren't random odd letters in this page of text we're both reading.

[Ripping CDs] a bit of an investment, but gives the most flexibility

I'm going to disagree here too - well, offer an alternative view anyway 🙂 The massive benefit of streaming music is that you can listen to stuff you haven't already bought, with far more variety than the piss poor selection of radio stations we have in the UK. And I can simply ask for an album I own if I feel like it as well. And then, on Amazon, when that album finishes it'll continue playing stuff that's similar which for me is the best way to get new stuff rather than the stations and playlists.

I’m going to question this. How does noise come into internet streaming?

Honestly no idea and there's every chance the suggestion is spurious. 😂

What's not spurious is the difference in audio quality (yes I've tested it, yes it was blind).

Edit. Perhaps the noise in a streaming set up would be introduced at the point the data enters to house. You have a data stream coming out of a router, down a cable and then into the music server (or whatever you're using). I know that routers are very 'noisy' devices and cable runs, which are very necessary, are where noise can end up getting into the signal path.

Again I could be wrong, I'm mostly regurgitating what I've read that was written by engineers. What I am knowledgable about is what I can hear and what difference certain things make to what I hear.

Yeah, i've ripped all my CDs (And DVD/Blurays) and put them on a server, in hindsight i should have just subscribed to two music services, a lot of my CDs weren't available on spotify, but are available elsewhere (eventually) so i spent weeks ripping stuff, most of which is now available elsewhere.

Also, the position of speakers and suchlike isn't really that good (i've got to have a life as well, so do the kids!), so i could easily cope with just using the poorer versions available online, rather than the .wav i have on the server.

mert
Free Member
@simondbarnes

Try “Device features” -Audio.

I don't have that option

Also, if you’re still only seeing limited features, you might need to reboot/reconnect.

Done that. no difference. It appears that the current version of Google Home has limited options for Chromecast Audio (after a quick look through the Google forums - which are bloody awful. Makes me laugh that people complain about this place!)

I just picked up an old Panasonic BluRay player and checked out the WhatHifi review.

https://www.whathifi.com/panasonic/dmp-bd45/review

Simple machine - it has no analogue audio outputs - so the only way sound is being processed is that it takes a digital bitstream off the disc and sends it over the HDMI cable to be decoded by whatever amp you're using.

What Hifi criticises audio for being "insubstantial and there's a lack of solidity to the sound"

Shrugs.

I'm not a network expert but as I understand it streaming comes via TCP which is a protocol designed to guarantee the correct data has been received. It uses a checksum, meaning that the outgoing data is divided up into packets and a number calculated based on the contents of the packet, called a checksum. This is sent along with the packet. At the other end, another checksum is calculated against what was received, and the two checksums compared. If it doesn't match, the receiver knows it hasn't been received correctly so it can ask for it again. This is important for things where accuracy is crucial e.g. text, but latency is not. You can wait another 100ms for your STW page to load, no bother, but you don't want it full of garbage text (certain threads notwithstanding).

The other way commonly used transmit data over the internet is UDP, where the data stream is divided up into chunks and sent, and if it's wrong it's wrong. This is best for some streaming applications like gaming or voice communication because you need the data asap, and if there's a mistake it will just manifest itself as a glitch in sound or in the position of a player in a game, and the next bit of data will correct that.

You might think they'd use UDP for music streaming, because it's streaming, but it's not real-time - the music has been recorded a long time ago and as long as all the chunks arrive in the right order it doesn't matter how long they take to get to you, same for movies. Music streaming receives data quite a long way in advance of what you are listening to - you could download the entire track in fits and starts, but as long as it all arrives ahead of the bit you're listening to you're ok. It could even be downloading the next track in the playlist whilst you are listening to the previous one.

The person talking about noise: it’s not always rubbish but in most cases not as simple as local Vs streaming.

What I see is decent CD player like Arcam or high end streamer. In both cases they have well thought design and decent PSU.

They are then compared to streaming into a cut price streamer / dac / preamp. These do create noise due to:

Cheap switching PSU
Poor or no grounding
Poor internal design / isolation

What’s more confusing is that a lot of the cut price Chinese DAC’s are actually pretty decent if you add a half decent PSU. Check this at the low - mid range products aimed to solve that are actually pretty decent: https://ifi-audio.com/products/ipower/

Anyway, decent stream from Qobuz itself is just 1 and 0’s and in itself will not contain noise.

Enjoy..

I have 2 PIs using https://www.hifiberry.com/dacs/

pi zero W works really well and is tiny.

Sound is really good, but your setup is higher standard than mine.

It allows you to "cast" from within spotify to the pi.

They are then compared to streaming into a cut price streamer / dac / preamp. These do create noise due to:

Cheap switching PSU
Poor or no grounding
Poor internal design / isolation

Yes, this is relevant to the DAC not the source of the bit-stream. We're talking about a CD transport vs internet streaming; as you say anything with analogue compoonents in it, which is wherever the digital stream gets converted to analogue signals is going to be highly quality dependent.

I assume that the quotes around the cast are to take account of the fact that you tell the Yamaha controller what you want to play from the MusicCast phone app and the controller takes it from there.

Spotify will cast directly to my Yamaha, you don't need Musiccast. In hi res mode, it sounds close enough to CD that I can't be bothered to rip them.