Streamers ranked by sound quality

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On 3/17/2019 at 12:01 PM, jaaptina said:

I have had several steamers in my system. I've experienced major improvements along the way.

 

Ranked by sound quality:

Yamaha wxc-50

Pioneer N-30 

Logitec Squeezebox

- big gap

Auralic Aries Mini with sbooster 

- big gap

Sonore microRendu with LPS-1

Sotm sms-200 with sbooster 

Auralic Aries femto with sbooster 

Sonore ultraRendu with LPS-1 

 

I'm interested how you rate other streamers from experience. Others like Cambridge CXN and 851N or steamers up to 2500 euro/dollar like Teac, Sotm, Lumin, Innuos Zen etc. 

 

Personaly I'm not interested in other functionality like dac and pre amp. I like to focus this list on the streamer sound quality (with the internal dac bypassed if existant).  

 

I understand that you are interested in transports with USB outputs, right? There are not so many transports with S/PDIF outputs and ranking these should not be too difficult, in principle. Still, I have yet to see detailed comparison between ND555, NDX2, ND5XS2, dCS Network Bridge, Aries G2, DigiOne Signature and ... what am I missing? I have a DigiOne Signature but I never had the opportunity to compare it to more expensive transports with S/PDIF outputs.

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1 hour ago, Rexp said:

Does anyone here think their Tidal replay is close to stored files? Thanks! 

I have cancelled my Tidal subscription long ago but I had a Qobuz Sublime subscription until November 2018. And yes, Qobuz replay was as good as replay from local and LAN 16bits/44.1kHz files. Now I am using Idagio and the replay quality is much lower as I have to cast Idagio contents via Airplay or Chromecast.

 

I have found by the way all these streaming services unacceptably dumb: none of them offers a means of organizing favorite albums by tags or folders. As a consequence, a  collection of more than a few dozens favorites becomes unmanageable.

 

I am going to cancel my Idagio subscription by the end of the month and will come back to Idagio or Qobuz once they will finally provide effective ways of managing and browsing a collection of selected favorites. The services as they are now are for me unusable.

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10 hours ago, wklie said:

 

Check out Roon (support Tidal and Qobuz) and see if it fills this need.

Unfortunately it doesn't. Roon can seamlessly  merge Tidal and Qobuz favorites into LAN collections but that's not what I want. I want a means of organizing my favorites in the Qobuz (Tidal, Idagio, etc.) app, ideally with user definable tags. Otherwise I would always be presented with different views of my collection depending on whether I am on the Qobuz (Tidal, Idagio, etc.) app or webpage or in a Roon control point. It is really not difficult to support user-specific tags, every halfway decent system for organizing photographs, mails, bookmarks, etc. provides such support. It's just internet streaming services of music and videos that only offer crap interfaces for relatively high prices.   

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5 minutes ago, thyname said:

Where does Chromecast Audio stand among all these? There is huge group of scientists that believe bits are bits and anything that streams stuff, as cheap as a Chromecast Audio would do, and will sound the same that any streamers out there. Key word: "bitperfect"!

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/review-and-measurements-of-schiit-bifrost-dac.7206/#lg=attachment24411&slide=0