Playing CDs sounds better than Qobuz — dammit

About four years ago, I ripped my 1000 CDs to a Zenith MK2 streamer and haven’t looked back.  I use Roon on a Mac mini for whole house stereo to powered speakers.  In my listening room, I use Innuos Sense, which sounds a LOT better than Roon.  

In my system, Tidal MQA and Qobuz HiRes sound about the same, with a slight edge to Qobuz on most tracks.  MP3s sound pretty good in my main system.  I think vinyl sounds better than CDs and anything streamed. 

I’ll be 74 in a few weeks.  For me it’s time to settle down and just enjoy the music.   Towards that end, I sold my McIntosh CD player (and my Mac preamp, power amp, and tuner) and plan to sell my Technics 1200G TT and the rest of my analog stuff.  With the proceeds, I plan to buy a better streamer and DAC, or a streamer/DAC combo - something in the 10-15K range.

When it comes to SQ, vinyl will always be my first love, but, for convenience and simplicity, I plan to spend the rest of my years streaming. My son has always wanted my 1500 albums; it’s time he gets them.

I think iphone is the bottleneck. If you had an external DAC, buy a lighting to USB (e.g. type B) adapter and hook up the iphone to the DAC. Or you could invest a portable DAC such as Audioquest Dragonfly Cobalt connected with an lighting to USB type A adapter. That will allow you play hi-res music through iphone. If you want to charge your iphone while playing music for a longer time period, buy a aforementioned lighting to USB adapter that also has a splitter from lighting to charger (also USB). 

I think the number one problem with satellite streaming is not really the gear (although that can be undeniably a big part of it as well) but it’s the process. The only potential fatal flaw I see there is hoping for the best when you’re trying to bounce the signal up to a satellite nearly 200 miles up and then back down again and expecting it to sound as good as a disc. Somehow, something tells me that process is just gonna be murder on the signal. We’ve more or less seen similar troubles crop up before when trying to run digital signals along lengths of wire. And yes, I know that in that case the signal is actually analog at that point, not digital, and I don’t really even know whether the beam to and from the satellite is in analog or digital form, but my point is simply that if transmitting the signal a short distance here on earth can give us fits, just try to imagine what the hurdles to overcome must be like for the 400 mi round trip...! In the end we may wind up with the technological service we desire, e.g. the one we thought we were getting, but I suspect it may take them a few attempts to get it right...and we’re still basically in the middle of our first commercial attempt. We may have to put this idea back in the oven to bake a little longer, but I’m guessing we’ll get there.

Maybe another way to look at that is, IMO, sending a hifi signal across the room via wifi OTOH, is a right good improvement over satellite streaming sq - maybe not q-u-i-t-e as good as disc - but rilly rilly close! Using better gear in that scenario, you’d think it would pay the dividends with sq that you might ordinarily expect to see. But, with satellite streaming I think the better gear might only go so far and then effectively no farther, really. At least for now. Hopefully they will get around to perfecting the satellite part of it.

@richtruss, I happen to agree with you that a good streamer running Qobuz, in a dedicated system that is properly filtered, sounds far superior to one that is using a CD transport as its music source. I would never have come to this conclusion without the help from both you and Rob. Thank you

After wading through all this it occurs to me that we don't know anything about the OPs system apart from iStuff.  Maybe I missed it?  Anyway, it's completely unsurprising that a reasonable CD player/transport on a reasonable system would sound better than the iStuff. I've got a kind of mid-fi setup with KEF LS50s, PS Audio Sprout 100 and Bluesound node 2i.  My android phone can stream through the Sprout via Bluetooth.  The Node 2i sounds far better (yeah, I know, Bluetooth yada yada).  I've also got a seriously high end "reference" system also using a Node 2i.  The differences are even more pronounced.  That said, the differences between the Node 2i and CDs and ripped CDs onto flac files is minimal.  And how much of that is imperfect level matching?  Anyway, what you've done (I think) is really just take Bluetooth out of the chain.  But what's the rest of the system?  Getting all kinds of specific advice on streamers, routers etc is, IMHO, pointless without knowing the rest of the chain.

My gut reaction is just get a Node 2i.  Use ethernet if you can.  Listen and compare.  I'd be amazed if it wasn't an improvement.  THEN contemplate how much better it needs to be, if at all.  If you upgrade just sell the Node 2i.  And forget the special audio router stuff unless the rest of your system is very very special (flame on!).