Bluesound Vault 2i, with external DAC and hi-end CD player

You can rip your CDs to a hard drive (NAS) but it is a bit tedious and time consuming. 

Why you're on analog section of the forum then ? 

llarry, You should delete this thread and repost it under the Digital topic. You don't want to start a turf war.  You can do this in your account. Click on the topic and to the right click on the gear symbol and your options will drop down. 

A quick answer to your question is that the Bluesound is probably a good enough streamer but its DAC is not that good. A standalone DAC might match your CD player. There are many threads about DACs and which ones to pair with the Bluesound.

I own the Bluesound Vault 2, connected to the DAC of an Audio Aero Capitol Reference CDP.  While I've found the Bluesound definitely benefits from an external DAC, the cd's ripped to the Vault don't sound as good as cd's played direct from my CDP.

Very sorry to have posted this in the wrong section. I am a newbie I didn’t know. I will take Tomcy6’s advice and move it. 

Tomcy6... sorry but I could not figure out your instructions.I Open my profile but could not find any thing about “topics“. A little more help would be much appreciated.

a better DAC will help the vault, but only so far

I have a Node2i and it is easy to do A/B tests because all its outputs are hot. I found a small preference for using coax out to an external dac (the one built into my amp) over RCA out of the Node - but I couldn’t tell if that was because of the different cables or because of the different dacs. I keep reading about the amazing difference cables can make, so, you know...

I have a Node2i and agree with the feedback regarding that using an external DAC improves the definition and clarity. 

I tried several DACs and they all sounded differently. It's a matter of finding the best match to the rest of your system.

It's kind of like tuning your system to find the sweet spot between sterile sound and smooth but slightly muddled. 

I found my sweet spot at least to my ears.