Uh-oh, Now He's Looking at DACs!

IMO The real gains come when the CDP is taken out of the equation....so my advice is to sell the CDP (while people still want them) and replace with a competent Streamer + NAS (after a demo of course).

Which brings me back to the original question I posed the other week about streamers, ho-hum! 

...zackly!

I'm still not wholey convinced a PC is better than a dedicated transport, though its hard to do any real world demoing because the set is totally different. CD's for what they are will be around for many moons to come imo, yes i can see folk downloading and i have done myself but i still like a copy as back if not anything else, PC's have a shelf life shorter than a CD, thats good enough to buy them imo, this week alone i've bought 7 The only thing that will take me away from buying CD's is Apple Cloud but only when it can stream CD quality, not interested in any lossy format for home listening. 

On a personnel note i'm putting a system together that should be finish very soon that i'll be able to compare PC audio to transport audio using a DAC/pre as the hub of the system with the transport will be connected to the dac via aes/ebu. I'm not 100% sure in the PC audio side of it and what would be a fair comparison, i could either stream via a Apple AEX (CD quality) it would then have to be Toslink Optical into the DAC or use something like a HiFace Evo from M2Tech or a Weiss INT202 then the aes/ebu into dac, i suppose i could try both 

ESP, hope ypur well, i never saw your streaming thread, stick a link up please.

What do you want your system to do its not doing now? Do you like the sound as is or would you like to take it in a different direction, sources are a great way of bring a new sound to the system. 

 

 

I think this is ESP2009's streamer thread shooter. Please correct me if I'm wrong ESP old chap. 

Oi!  "Old chap"?!?!  OK, you're correct; that is the thread.

Shooter, thanks for the interesting post - I look forward to further updates.

For my own part, although I know I am getting a great sound, I always want to know what's over that next hill, as it were.  That aside, I am ready to accept that maybe streaming of high quality music is worthy of serious consideration.  It is not always convenient to access a CD of our choice, whereas if a computer-based system provides the same or better quality, I am more than willing to give it my attention.

 

No problem ESP, i can do a streamed aex/toslink optical to dac and a transport to dac set up. I should be picking up my dac at the end of the week and looking through the manual yesterday i can do a cat6 connection from transport to dac so have ordered a 1 meter Neutrik NKE6S-*

This wont be an ideal set up as the cat6 and toslink connections are different beasts totally with the cat6 being far superior in bandwidth though but the aex is good as a streamer with a pretty low noise floor and low jitter output. I could buy a toslink to cat converter for the experimant but i'm not sure if anything i'll gain in in doing it. Its just another link/convertion that we could do without, i say keep it as simple as possible. Nothings ever easy and simple is it 

Oh, well it wasn't intended to offend, or make a comment at your age (or worse) merely a (somewhat antiquated) form of address, better than mate IMO. 

None taken ole bean.   I'm with you on the 'mate' thing: far too familiar for my liking. 

The OH is away again in a few weeks and I might see if I can get a DAC (or two) to try out. Although I am not sure if the Naim sound is for me, perhaps I might also try out a Uniti with the idea of ditching current CDP and amp.  Who knows?  Feeding into the ProAcs, it might fit right in.

I look forward to your report.  I am not sure that simplicity really fits into hi-fi unless you're very lucky or, dare I say, readily satisfied with a combination of kit and resultant sound, without that drive to ask: "but what if?"

I've got to say that my thoughts keep gravitating back to the Naim Uniti, even more so since they announced the 2nd version. I like the idea of having everything I need in a tidy little package and I've always hankered after some Naim kit on my rack. I wonder if my local dealer could lend me one, I might e-mail him. 

Good luck with your search ESP. 

I must admit that having listened to a couple of Naim separates last year I have been a bit reluctant to give consideration to the range. I note that a post I saw elsewhere on the interweb did describe the Naim sound as sometimes "shouty".  I have to agree that this was an impression I got, too.  However, I am not averse to giving the Uniti a listen.  I might have to have a word with my local Music Matters branch...