As an audio distributor I learn a ton of knowledge by
listening to my clients. The best piece of digital advice that was given to us by
one of our clients is to look at digital like a piece of pie. If you have an
average USB cable, you are missing 1/8 of the pie and there are a ton of
average USB cables. If you are using average blue Cat 5 router cable, you are
picking up noise thru that cable and missing another 1/8 of the pie. If you are
NOT hardwired to your router, you are missing another 1/8 of the pie. If you
are using an average server you are missing 1/4 of the pie. When you start to
add the whole amount of digital signal missing, it becomes oblivious why the
streaming service is not as good as your CD player but if you solve the weak
links than Tidal can sound very good. We have directly A/B tested 76 different
digital front ends as of May 2019 and we have found that the server was the
most important part of setting up a digital system properly, followed by the
dac but most people focus on the dac first. The proper cables are also super important and hardwired, in our opinion, solves a lot of problems.
Cheers,