About a year ago I decided I wanted to move into streaming my own music. I had a collection of around 400 CDs and 1000 LPs. I have four very standard and I suppose “old-fashioned” two channel Stereo systems, the main one an almost high end living room system centered around Quad ESL-63 Electrostatic Speakers and a French made tube integrated amplifier, CD player, tape player and turntable.
Not necessarily relevant, but I also have three other full featured stereo systems in my house and, like you, good quality of audio is important. For example, I’ve never used iTunes because it’s all as far as I know in degraded MP3 sound. I had hoped to get them all playing my streamed music.
My nephew helped me get started and recommended I purchase a Naim Uniti Core which has a reputation for very good audio. It also has the capability to rip all my CDs, contains a pocket for storing an internal hard drive which holds all the ripped music in its new digitized format, including the all important metadata. Lastly, the Naim device also acts as a streamer when activated by a corresponding Naim app for my iPad. Sounded pretty simple and straightforward.
When my nephew told me I needed a DAC to connect the Naim streamer to my audio system to convert the digital stream from the Naim to the analog format expected by my stereo system I realized I had a concept problem and that’s when I started to realize I was in a complicated new environment. Never having the need of a DAC before, I didn’t really understand why I needed a DAC. It seems dead simple now but my point is that when you dip your toes into the digital world that you are asking about, you will find it chock full of potentially bewildering options and a bazillion acronyms, It took me a long time to get reasonably conversant in this new environment. In hindsight I think a picture would have been worth a thousand words. In other words, I think what would have most helped me would be visiting a dealer or a friend who has something set up reasonably close to what I wanted to achieve. I tried to get educated by reading and it seemed to take me forever. But you need to do both or you won’t likely understand what a dealer will be telling you!
Just deciding on a starting point is potentially difficult because there are a lot of different equipment makers out there for both streamers and DACs. DACs can be particularly complicated because there are many competing ideas on how to achieve the all important digital to analog conversion. Some can decode only PCM, others add MQA and a few can do pure DSD. And you’ll want something that can decode the highest resolution music stream. See, already those acronyms crop up and initially I didn’t have a clue what they meant. And there’s a lot more to it than that. So buying a DAC can be complicated. And they can get very pricey.
There are also all sorts of options for ripping and storing your own music. The Naim made it really simple for me, though I’ve since discovered it has limitations. I don’t think I’d choose it again. Someone mentioned Bluesound. It has a lot more features than my Naim Uniti Core making it a good starting point because it greatly simplifies getting started. Like the Naim, it has a ripper and internal storage and unlike the Naim, I believe it acts as both a streamer and a DAC. It is at the very cheap end of the equipment possibilities, so if your budget is more flexible, keep looking. But my point is, keeping it simple in the beginning is not a bad idea. Otherwise you get into more complicated software choices and storage issues, like investing in a NAS for example.. (There’s yet another potentially mysterious acronym).
I hope this helps get you started and good luck.
