Bluesound experience

faxfan

faxfan

faxfan

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Joined
22 Jun 2013
Posts
481
Location
Zomerset (Glastonbury)
Hi All,

Thought I'd share my recent upgrade(?)/change from a Sonos connect / Cyrus 5 Integrated AMP (very old) to a NAD 368 with Bluesound module (Black Friday deal £1198 -> £899) - both instances running PMC DB1i speakers.

The primary driver was to update my very old AMP and get access to Tidal MQA.

The sound quality I'm now getting is like night and day, it's absolutely incredible. I suspect a lot of this was down to the AMP because even the normal Tidal and Spotify (both HiFi / premium) sounded a whole lot better. Though the Tidal MQA has to be said is amazing, comparing MQA to HiFi on Tidal you can certainly tell the difference.

The downside - software (Mac OSX). The bluesound controller works and is functional, it's slower than Sonos and it's not all in one i.e. you have to run the Spotify desktop app and select the Bluesound device, then both the spotify and bluesound controller can control volume / pause etc. A bit odd and could confuse people. The Sonos is much slicker in it's integration and presentation. The big caveat is I haven't tried the IOS / Android / Windows apps, these of course could be much better.

So I will stay with Bluesound on the AMP but still run Sonos in other parts of the house.
 
That looks like a very clever bit of kit.
Does the app include room correction capability?

Do be careful of talking too much about MQA, before you get the "anti-hype" zealots on the case.
 
Mr_Sukebe said:
That looks like a very clever bit of kit.
Does the app include room correction capability?

Do be careful of talking too much about MQA, before you get the "anti-hype" zealots on the case.
Click to expand...

I haven't look for room correction, but I'll have a look.

I was wondering about MQA but to my ears and listening environment it made a difference, a significant difference - I'll have to get a friend to do a blind test for me!
 
faxfan said:
I haven't look for room correction, but I'll have a look.

I was wondering about MQA but to my ears and listening environment it made a difference, a significant difference - I'll have to get a friend to do a blind test for me!
Click to expand...

I'd be curious about your feedback.
Amongst the hifi forums that I frequent, the subject has become rather heated, mainly from disbelievers, typically passing on poor info like a bunch of lemmings. So right now, the jury is very much out.
 
I'd say you need half decent equipment to get the most of the difference, which hifi forums do you frequent?
 
faxfan said:
Did the blind test 9/10 I could identify MQA.
Click to expand...

Good to know, thanks.
There's more noise on the Roon forums that they'll include part of the MQA process into software (similar to Tidal). If that ever happens (they've been saying this since Jan 2016), then I might well give Tidal another go.
 
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