Whats New

[rollo]

   As of today what is the most affective way of streaming ? Is Sonos still a favorite ? What do you do ?


charles

[Scottdazzle]

Charles, this is not aimed at you but since you raised the subject of streaming I thought I should say something.  Streaming is a massive ripoff of songwriters and recording artists.  They make much smaller royalties from streaming than from purchase of their music (literally pennies on the dollar).  The companies like Spotify and Pandora are making all the money. 

Because I love music and want to support the artists who enrich my life, I am not going to stream music.  My two cents worth.

[ejk]

Im using a Bluesound Node to Schiit dac. 3 tb hard drive hooked to my network. Slowly ripping my cd's to it.

[tmazz]

Charles, this is not aimed at you but since you raised the subject of streaming I thought I should say something.  Streaming is a massive ripoff of songwriters and recording artists.  They make much smaller royalties from streaming than from purchase of their music (literally pennies on the dollar).  The companies like Spotify and Pandora are making all the money. 

Because I love music and want to support the artists who enrich my life, I am not going to stream music.  My two cents worth.

I understand where you are coming from, but it is the new way of the world and artists who don't learn how to work within the new market place will find themselves out in the cold income wise. While I understand and applaud your philosophical stand, the reality is there are just too few likeminded people for the old cashflow paradigm to survive. But if you look at the current music marketplace you can see the cashflow shifting away from music sales. Back in the sixties and seventies concert tours were underwritten by the record companies as a way of advertizing and promoting record sales. Concert tickets for major artists could be had for $10 and ubder, which at the time was not to far away from the list price of the albums they were promting. The shows were cheap and myabe broke even and the artists made their money from album sales. Fast forward to recent years and the tables have turned 180 degree. Artists now release albums as a way to attract fans to concerts which is where =the lion's share of their income now comes from. The last time The Eagles played Nassau Colesium the cheapest seats in the house were $146! That compared to current CD list prices of $16.98.
Example two is that of Diana Krall. Her latest album , "WallFlower", was scheduled to go on sale last Sept. Not long before the release date Dainan developed pnuemonia and was force to cancel all of the concert dates she had scheduled for the remaineder of the year. In response to that the album release was pushed back to Feb 2015 so that it could be coordinated with the new concert schedule out of fear that having the album released too far before the tour would hurt ticket sales.

Lastly classical music has been supported for the most part by the proceeds from concert performances (be it in this case from both ticket sales and sposer underwriting) with very little of the operating income coming from record sales as runaway sales of a classical album is a pretty rare occurance. So while sourcing a musicians income maily through album sales is certainly not in keeping with what went on in the Pop world over the last 4 or 5 decades, it is not unprecidented and it has worked in other sections of the industry. So we are not without hope.

[mdconnelly]

Streaming for me is primarily streaming my own music ripped or downloaded from sources I purchased.   I'm still a huge Squeezebox fan and have yet to find something I like better to replace it with.  I just keep my server running 24/7 and stream within my house as well as externally to wherever I am.  As long as I've got a good internet connection, I'm listening to my own tunes. 

Yes, musicians are getting totally screwed, but I have to agree with tmazz... the music industry is changing rapidly and while I certainly cannot say it's for the better (at least not for musicians) it is the way of the world.  To make money as a musician, you have to perform. Often. CD and downloads are now the loss leaders.  Still necessary and a key part of the music chain, but no longer the cash cow it once was. 

But hey, there will always be music and because of that, I'm a big believer that the music industry has a lot more changing to do. 

[richidoo]

   As of today what is the most affective way of streaming ? Is Sonos still a favorite ? What do you do ?

Computer Player>USB async> low jitter I2S>DAC. 

The DAC output stage as as much effect on perceived SQ as all the preceding steps, imo. Eschew LME49710 with unity gain.   Speaking of suffocating, is it OK to bash Bryston now that even Weeeerrrd has dumped his?

Sonos is a pretty good interface by hardware player standards, but it is still limited in what you can do compared to a good computer player, like JRiver or Foobar. Also, the SQ of Sonos digital and analog outputs is poor by audiophile standards. There is multi-voltage switching power supplies with minimal screening too close to signals, the worst quality JRC opamps, fashion over function, but of course that's how you must be to sell anything to the masses these days.

A small, quad-core Celeron fanless computer can be had for $200 with Windows 8.1.

Or Cubox running Volumio player on linux <$100.

Streaming is the easy part. If you want to do any DSP like room correction, Dirac, EQ, crossovers then you have to consider how much power you need.

The What's New in the realm of streaming is the USB to I2S adapters which get the jitter <1pS, the upsampling to DSD, and the new DAC chips like Sabre.

[rollo]

  Thanks Richidoo that is what I was looking for. Very informative.


charles

[Nick B]

I am really liking both the Bluesound Vault and the Cocktail Audio X12.
I want an all in one solution so the idea of having onboard storage really works for me. I definitely am going to use an external dac. 

[machinehead]

Squeezebox is still the best. It really comes down to the user interface and ease of use. The options small companies have are astronomically priced for what you get. Plus are you really getting a product with the user friendliness of the defunct SB. I don't know. $300 vs the $5K $12K options they gouge you with now.
bahhaha
Yes run the streamed material through an external DAC not out of the SB.

[tmazz]

Streaming for me is primarily streaming my own music ripped or downloaded from sources I purchased.   I'm still a huge Squeezebox fan and have yet to find something I like better to replace it with.  I just keep my server running 24/7 and stream within my house as well as externally to wherever I am.  As long as I've got a good internet connection, I'm listening to my own tunes. 

Yes, musicians are getting totally screwed, but I have to agree with tmazz... the music industry is changing rapidly and while I certainly cannot say it's for the better (at least not for musicians) it is the way of the world.  To make money as a musician, you have to perform. Often. CD and downloads are now the loss leaders.  Still necessary and a key part of the music chain, but no longer the cash cow it once was. 

But hey, there will always be music and because of that, I'm a big believer that the music industry has a lot more changing to do. 

When you think about it music, and musicians have exitsted for ages while recorded music and the cashflows associated are a product of only the past 80 or so years. Prior to that musicians who made a living at it did so through performing (and perhaps a bit of teaching). so perhaps this "reinvention" of the music business is really less of a "Brave New World" and more "Back tothe Future."

[mdconnelly]

When I posted about using my Squeezeboxen, I forgot about a recent experience I had!  I had borrowed a Devialet 120 from Shane prior to the holidays.  Pricey, yes, but pretty damn special IMO.  Saving my pennies for the 200...

While I didn't have the time to do any in-depth comparisons, I did try the streaming function of the Devialet as well.  Basically, any music I play on my computer could be streamed over my home network to the Devialet.  It just involved installing a driver on the computer that would reroute music to the Devialet via my home network - wired or wireless.  Worked like a charm and sounded damn good. 

But, what I've found hard to beat with the Squeezebox setup is synchronized playback to multiple players throughout my house.  Not gonna buy multiple Devialets to do that.  Still, it was  impressive to see how thoroughly well designed the Devialet is.

[Nick B]

Once I got iPeng ( which has a problem right now) I appreciated the SB a lot more. It did take a visit by a computer tech a few years ago to get it to work and figure out what was blocking the program from working. For me, I'm willing to pay up to $1,000 to have an all in one unit, excluding the dac. As it is, I have too many boxes, wires etc etc that I no longer want to look at. Convenience has its price.

[mdconnelly]

I really like iPeng on my iphone and it is one slick little app.  I love the fact that I can stream to it as well as control any of my other squeezeboxes.   

For the my wife's iPad, I've installed Squeezepad and she far prefers it.  While not nearly as flexible/configurable as iPeng I have to admit it seems far more intuitive for the casual user.  But it's an iPad only app.

[Nick B]

I took a look at Squeezepad and it looks quite good. Part of the problem with this stuff is making it user friendly for my wife. I guess if I have Logitech load up on my PC's startup that will help quite a bit. But that's one reason I'm looking at all in one solutions. I know nothing about a NAS setup. If I did that, would that be a bit easier to run for my wife? Any info is appreciated!

[mdconnelly]

. I know nothing about a NAS setup. If I did that, would that be a bit easier to run for my wife? Any info is appreciated!

I've not tried to configure a NAS but many have.   If you go to forums.slimdevices.com I'm sure you can find a thread about it. 

I have a fairly old PC running Win7 configured with:
-- 128G SSD boot drive
-- 2TB harddrive (for all music, pictures, etc...)
-- LMS 7.9 (latest)

I just let it run 24/7.  I use Crashplan to backup all my music, pictures, etc... Works extremely well.    My wife knows nothing about LMS nor ever touches the PC running it.  She just uses the Squeezepad app and occasionally gets annoyed when the PC running LMS reboots for windows updates or some other glitch.

I don't know how many more years LMS has but I know a hell of a lot of people are happily using it and with apps like iPeng, SqueezePad and others for Android, it has to be the best-bang-for-the-buck music streaming solution around.   I've been using it since 2006 and have yet to see anything that would tempt me to completely replace it.

But, you have to be willing to tinker a bit to get it all configured correctly and I think that's the reason Logitech felt like it couldn't become the mainstream product they wanted.