The Bigblog!

Today is the first day I've missed having the X50D, or any streamer really.

Whilst ploughing through a few CDs, which sounded fab btw, I had the urge to listen to some Steely Dan. As it happens, I don't have Steely Dan on CD, so £35 later I have the four disc box set on the way.

In the meantime I thought I'd have a listen to some jazz. The album I had in mind Is also absent from my CD collection. I didn't buy it but did check the cost.

I then decided to have a look for some other CDs I know I haven't got, and it appears that the second hand CD market is starting to creep up in price. A few weeks back I could have got 30 CDs for £35, now they are back up to £4-5 per album.

It wasn't lost on me that £35 gets me Quboz for three months and all the Steely Dan anyone could want, albeit at a lesser (IMO) SQ than CD, nor was it lost on me that I now own those CDs forever, but still, collecting CDs is suddenly looking like it's gonna be more expensive than I planned.

Maybe I need to rethink this plan a bit.

It's a good point.

Finding myself wanting everything 🤣

We can't tell the difference either Andrew, neither can we when playing a cd vs streaming. Played a cd a couple of days ago, first in I don't know how long, and strangely enough, yesterday I was going to buy 3 Gert Emmens cd's from Bandcamp. They were going to cost approx £14 more than the digital downloads, got to the checkout, I thought shipping charges would be grouped, no another £17 was to be charged. Removed cd's from trolley and went for the digital downloads, now on the internal storage of the Eversolo and K50.

Streaming / owning the hardcopy.
I dont think there's a significant audible difference.


Well, kind of. Different cdps definitely sound different, so maybe it's fun if you can choose your preferred deviation from neutral.

For me it all comes down to listening habits.
If you want to mostly play the same recordings over and over, then owning the discs seems sensible.
If you're into new recordings and exploration in a big way, then streaming is simply a dream come true.

I agree, there's no right or wrong, just what works best for you at a particular period in time.

I've 2,000 CDs stacked neatly and alphabetically on shelves.
They never get played these days.

I know it is a bit basic but I have a Raspberry Pi4 with Picoreplayer on it if you want to try that ?

I appreciate the offer, but I'll pass thanks.

The laptop is one of the new Samsung Book things, which after a little reading suggests can be more than adequate if configured correctly.

I am looking for a Mercury V2 streamer, but have enquired as to the difference between MK2 and MK3 versions.

Was going to suggest a WP also, use it for finding the music you want to buy on physical media.

Yup, my priority is cheap but excellent performance, which the Pi2AES should achieve.

Oli just spotted a Pi2aes DIY streamer on eBay . Not perhaps what you are looking for but may well be a stop gap while you find one . It would also give you scope for improving the power supply and adding a good case of you wanted to .

Oli the V2 is based on the Compute Module 4 which is a cut down Raspberry Pi so the bones are the same just the peripherals are different . As someone who has used Pi based players and Pi servers I do not hold the view that they are poor sounding versions of streamers in fact with good power supplies and decent hats such as the Pi2aes at the time and Allo Digihat Signature later they offer very high quality playback . Often people just see the very simple cases and presume they can not possibly sound any good but they do . Many companies have used the Pi as the basis for their own streamers but often want to keep it quiet because of the suggestion there is something cheap about them

Had a think about your comments and in truth I have never used a usb cable for signal to DAC , mainly because i do not have a usb DAC but also because I have never been convinced about usb being used as a digital audio transfer medium , but I think that is a very different can of worms .

Now using a Pi as a music server with an SSD HD attached via USB has been something I have done and in my view it has worked well . Up to Pi4 the USB on any Pi was not that good and shared its pwoer with other chips on the design which was not great and caused noise . From Pi 4 they got better solo implementation of USB and it was much better . In the years before that change there were two tweaks that I was shown that could really make things work much better , but more important sound much better as well . First was to increase the power output on the Pi to full for the USB . Some HD units demanded quite a lot of power and performance was reduced unless they were fed this .

Second and really the most important and which I still used with the Pi4 despite its improvements is that within the settings of LMS you can vary how the server deals with incoming streams . One option is that you can use an oversize SD card (32G but I use 64 or 128) and then you set the server to cache any stream on to the SD card which then holds it and sends the stream to the player from there . This in effect means when you are playing any music it is not coming direct from the SSD HD but direct from the internal SD card . There is some where a tool that allows you to vary the cache size which can be another rabbit hole that you can go down to get the best compromises of size and sound quality . Also on Moode audio they offer this option on a player so you can have the same treatment done at the end point rather than at the server . I have tried this but I am not going to be able to say honestly that I could notice a difference were it was done . I will however say for sure that cacheing the music on one of the SD cards did make a very definite improvement .

I currently use a LIV Zen as my LMS server and this is a small form PC with a SATA HD in place . THis was made by Innuos before they changed their name and is based on an old set up called Vortex Box . It is very old but still works without any issues and you are also able to switch it to cache the stream before sending , though in this case it is going to RAM rather than an SD card . I do not think it sounds any better than my Pi LMS and the main reason to switch was that I could put a new 8 TB SATA HD in in to give me loads of room to add more music 2 TB options had run out of space on the Pi and 4 TB SSD drives are a bit expensive .

Not a bad shout at all Dave.

I initially overlooked these due to the omission of AES output (which I still think it should have), however I am now pretty happy using both coax and (even more so!) USB, so it's a more attractive package for sure.

You can get NVMe storage (just like an SSD drive) that does not use the USB port but a connection directly to the board giving you the internal storage you require using a hat etc.