The Dark Side; Digital audio equipment recommendations and setup.

Ghost said:
I spent hours last night listening to stuff on it and was having an absolute blast. Honestly, I enjoyed it more than I have vinyl recently because I had no creeping neurosis around anticipating pressing defects or hearing distracting surface noise. I just got to sit back and relax and get lost in the sound for the first time in a long time. What a great investment!
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I have had my Node 2i for about 16 months now and very happy that I sprung for it.
 
Ghost said:
I spent hours last night listening to stuff on it and was having an absolute blast. Honestly, I enjoyed it more than I have vinyl recently because I had no creeping neurosis around anticipating pressing defects or hearing distracting surface noise. I just got to sit back and relax and get lost in the sound for the first time in a long time. What a great investment!
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Yea it’s a great piece of equipment to have! I love my streamer too. I still buy and listen to records a lot but the streamer is great to have for records that are too expensive or I don’t need. I’ve been buying less and less current music on vinyl because of the pressing issues that pop up, so I’ll buy on bandcamp or stream instead. Or even if I’m lazy and don’t want to have to get up to flip a record haha. It’s been fun for me to get various CD rips to compare mastering for too, or buy CDs to rip. Roon is the thing that really tied everything together for me since I had a ton of downloads.

As @JohnnyCashFan said, you can still upgrade the sound later if you feel the need to with an external DAC.

Are you using Tidal?
 
Splunders said:
Agreed. Running my Node 2i to a Denafrips Pontus II for the past couple months. The Node 2i as a streaming DAC still impresses me given its price, but when the Denafrips went in, I didn't touch a record for about a month.
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Really like my Schitt Modius DAC, for $200 (less if you watch for used). Some people also like Topping (different sound). Higher end dacs from Schitt, Chord, Topping, and Denafrips are well regarded.
 
MikeH said:
Yea it’s a great piece of equipment to have! I love my streamer too. I still buy and listen to records a lot but the streamer is great to have for records that are too expensive or I don’t need. I’ve been buying less and less current music on vinyl because of the pressing issues that pop up, so I’ll buy on bandcamp or stream instead. Or even if I’m lazy and don’t want to have to get up to flip a record haha. It’s been fun for me to get various CD rips to compare mastering for too, or buy CDs to rip. Roon is the thing that really tied everything together for me since I had a ton of downloads.

As @JohnnyCashFan said, you can still upgrade the sound later if you feel the need to with an external DAC.

Are you using Tidal?
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Completely agree, hearing it made me immediately cancel my Secretly Society membership because all of the albums they press sound much better on Tidal even without an MQA option available. Why roll the dice when digital can sound as good as it does?

Have yet to start using Roon though, going to start looking into very soon here.
 
Ghost said:
Completely agree, hearing it made me immediately cancel my Secretly Society membership because all of the albums they press sound much better on Tidal even without an MQA option available. Why roll the dice when digital can sound as good as it does?

Have yet to start using Roon though, going to start looking into very soon here.
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I think Roon is only worth it if you have tons of downloaded files as well. I think I have about 600 downloaded/ripped/high-res albums locally so Roon really helps blend that library with my favorites on Qobuz. And its such a nice UI. If I didn't have the downloads, I'd just use Tidal Connect or Qobuz/the built in OS for my streamer. I think I have a referral link if you wanna test it out for 30 days though.
 
Ghost said:
Completely agree, hearing it made me immediately cancel my Secretly Society membership because all of the albums they press sound much better on Tidal even without an MQA option available. Why roll the dice when digital can sound as good as it does?

Have yet to start using Roon though, going to start looking into very soon here.
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Roon is a real wonderful rabbit hole. If you have a large digital collection on your computer and streaming it is worth it I think.
 
So is Roon essentially an aggregated digital library that supports all different audio file formats? I remember torrenting FLAC files by accident in my teens during high school but remember they weren’t supported in iTunes. So is Roon a library that can store MP3s, FLACs and more in one place? Is there a benefit of having Roon over just keeping all of your files on a hard drive that you can **theoretically** plug into your Bluesound and reference them from there? Not even sure if you can do the latter, just hypothesizing.
 
Ghost said:
So is Roon essentially an aggregated digital library that supports all different audio file formats? I remember torrenting FLAC files by accident in my teens during high school but remember they weren’t supported in iTunes. So is Roon a library that can store MP3s, FLACs and more in one place? Is there a benefit of having Roon over just keeping all of your files on a hard drive that you can **theoretically** plug into your Bluesound and reference them from there? Not even sure if you can do the latter, just hypothesizing.
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You can add streaming albums and tracks from Qobuz and/or Tidal to the library alongside your files and edit the metadata to suit your preferences. It basically allows you to have a digital library customised to your preferences using both streaming and files.
 
Ghost said:
So is Roon essentially an aggregated digital library that supports all different audio file formats? I remember torrenting FLAC files by accident in my teens during high school but remember they weren’t supported in iTunes. So is Roon a library that can store MP3s, FLACs and more in one place? Is there a benefit of having Roon over just keeping all of your files on a hard drive that you can **theoretically** plug into your Bluesound and reference them from there? Not even sure if you can do the latter, just hypothesizing.
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As @Joe Mac said, the benefit is you can have your streaming + downloaded formats (pretty much any format...FLAC, MP3, WAV, etc) all as one cohesive library. It's a software solution, so you'd need the hardware side. It could be any number of options. The easiest/cheapest to start would probably just be on your desktop computer or a laptop. Whatever the device is, it needs to be powered on anytime you want to run Roon. This is called the Roon core. You select what folders you want it to index on there for your downloaded music library.

Then you just open the Roon app on your phone, select what you want your output to be (in your case it'd be the Node) and scroll through your library. It'll have all your indexed files from your harddrive or Rooncore PLUS all your favorites from Tidal or Qobuz. If there are duplicates (i.e. say you have one album as a downloaded MP3 but you also have it favorited in Tidal), I believe Roon will autoselect whichever is higher quality. Or if you prefer your local download, you can set that as the preferred version of the album. Any time you add new songs or albums to your local library, or favorite an album in Tidal, it will update the software library automatically. Searching in Roon will search your local download library + streaming service in one go.

There are tons of features. You can do multi-room audio with Roon-ready or Roon-tested devices. You can sort by just about every possible category of metadata--so you can show only your FLAC files, or only your DSD files, etc. You can also filter by composer/artist and I think even stuff like dynamic range.

It keeps track of your top artists, top albums, listening time, favorite genres, etc. It recommends new releases, has album reviews built in, etc.

To get an idea of the full uses and features, I'd say set aside some time on a weekend or one night to set up a temporary Roon core on a computer, have your downloaded files all in one location and try the 30 day trial. I hated the proprietary OS on my streamer and found it was annoying to listen to stream music. I use Qobuz primarily so didn't have Tidal Connect. I did a trial of Roon and never looked back.
 
So having tried the Oppo with SACD's in which I own both albums, I would say consistently the stage is a tad smaller, and the imaging is... well... different. This could be down to mastering, but I doubt it as the observations are consistent across albums. There seems to be a teeny veil, where with the vinyl the speakers disappear a bit more. It's just a bit more in the room. Also, in complicated sections of music I can still hear everything, but there seems to be less separation. Things feel more busy.

I can get things a tad better by playing with the negative feedback on the preamp. But it only gets me half way home.

I'm going to try an ARCAM that I almost got instead in the same price range as the Oppo that ONLY does discs and DAC. The user interface of the oppo is a little much if you ONLY want to mess with 2 channel audio. The guy at upscale thought I might find the ARCAM a bit strident given my penchant for tubes. I think after listening to this he might just be wrong. I'm missing the mid high forward and high end clarity as well as a wider mid range. I'm thinking the ARCAM might just be more my speed. Either way I think the difference is livable and I will definately be mixing Discs with vinyl.
 
VMPKJ said:
So having tried the Oppo with SACD's in which I own both albums, I would say consistently the stage is a tad smaller, and the imaging is... well... different. This could be down to mastering, but I doubt it as the observations are consistent across albums. There seems to be a teeny veil, where with the vinyl the speakers disappear a bit more. It's just a bit more in the room. Also, in complicated sections of music I can still hear everything, but there seems to be less separation. Things feel more busy.

I can get things a tad better by playing with the negative feedback on the preamp. But it only gets me half way home.

I'm going to try an ARCAM that I almost got instead in the same price range as the Oppo that ONLY does discs and DAC. The user interface of the oppo is a little much if you ONLY want to mess with 2 channel audio. The guy at upscale thought I might find the ARCAM a bit strident given my penchant for tubes. I think after listening to this he might just be wrong. I'm missing the mid high forward and high end clarity as well as a wider mid range. I'm thinking the ARCAM might just be more my speed. Either way I think the difference is livable and I will definately be mixing Discs with vinyl.
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ARCAAAAAM

I have a AVR 550. I dig it. CLAAAARITYYYY

Sorry, I've been at work learning the new board... This is currently as in depth as my brain gets... I've got like 2 neurons firing right now...
 
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Mather said:
ARCAAAAAM

I have a AVR 550. I dig it. CLAAAARITYYYY

Sorry, I've been at work learning the new board... This is currently as in depth as my brain gets... I've got like 2 neurons firing right now...
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I'm going to be trying the CDS50 From the amp I tried previously I remembered the CLAAAAARITYY for sure. There was a sort of shiny quality like subtle reverb that I didn't care for on the amp. I liked it otherwise. It seems they tune in that clear direction, and I suspect the disc player won't actually have that quality as it's not an amp.
 
VMPKJ said:
I'm going to be trying the CDS50 From the amp I tried previously I remembered the CLAAAAARITYY for sure. There was a sort of shiny quality like subtle reverb that I didn't care for on the amp. I liked it otherwise. It seems they tune in that clear direction, and I suspect the disc player won't actually have that quality as it's not an amp.
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Reverb BAAAAAD claaaaarity GUUUUUD
 
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