Hi all,
I have recently revived my old arcam 290 and 290P amps that I broke a few years ago. Apart from the famous dodgy input selector switch they still sound great, even through my very old Mission 702e floorstanders.
I know this type of gear is low end for some, but I like it and it isn't dead yet.
I'd like to get it hooked up to all my music services and PC. With that in mind what are peoples recommendations for streamers? I've seen the Arcam ST60 and the cambridge audio offerings - are there anymore that offer good value?
I also have a schitt audio dac to use.
Thanks
Thinking about the spectrum of people who stream, it ranges from those who mostly play content they've ripped to their own library devices - a PC or a NAS, and so
@hornetstinger 's comments about slow and clunky library management are valid. At the other end of the range there are those for whom streaming means playing almost everything from online services. That could mean coping with the user interfaces of several different streaming services, or eventually gravitating to one or two where the compromises are acceptable. Quite a lot of us sit somewhere between these to points.
What unites most of us is the desire to have a single solution that does it all properly. If anything then, this marks the watershed between classic Hi-Fi thinking of boxes, and power supplies, and circuit design - all the physical stuff that made say the ARCAM Delta a better amp than a Denon PMA-250 of a similar vintage - and the new world thinking where product quality is heavily influenced by intangible stuff such as software design.
More specifically, it highlights the difference between the brands that have been used to doing everything in-house and the new ways of working where a company is smart enough to let go of the reins because they realise they're good at hardware but someone else is far better at the software thing. A good parallel example of this is smart TVs versus streaming sticks/boxes.
To put it bluntly, the software design and implementation of most smart TV streaming apps sucks. You can spend anything from under £500 to over £1,500 on a 55" TV and yet a £40 Fire TV stick runs rings around it for streaming because the software works better. It's quicker, easier to use and better supported all because the company behind it are software designers first and foremost. They're not hardware people trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to software design. I think the same is largely true with streamers.
You have brands such as Naim, Linn, ARCAM, and Cambridge Audio who all cut their teeth in hardware design. They're now making streamers where software is arguably just as important as the hardware -
maybe even more so - but because they're all used to doing everything in-house, they also try to do the software development in-house too. IMO this is their failing. I'm reminded of ARCAM's AV amps. The DVD-era stuff was really very good. Dealing with optical and coaxial input signals was well within the brand's capabilities. ARCAM's AVR did a lot of what you'd expect from a Denon or Pioneer, Onkyo or Yamaha,but with better audio quality. Then HDMI arrived and the wheels fell off the ARCAM wagon. It took them a long time to get to grips with the tech. The new AVRs were flaky and it seemed a couple of generations behind the mainstream brands. When the competition was processing audio via HDMI, ARCAM was just a HDMI switch. When they had ARC, ARCAM was a couple of years behind, and when they handled 4K, ARCAM was still in 1080p-land. I'm not trying to bash ARCAM. I have a lot of respect for the brand. But that doesn't change the fact that they screwed up the transition to HDMI because their software team wasn't up to scratch.
What's all this leading up to?
I'm going to recommend an inexpensive streamer for a couple of main reasons. It's a bit of a leftfield choice because it's not shackled to old-school Hi-Fi thinking. This isn't a big box because it doesn't need to be. But it still has superb audio performance by any Hi-Fi standard. It's the
Escape M1 Air.
The second main reason for recommending it is because the designers were smart enough to incorporate
Roon compatibility.
What's Roon?
If the goal is to bring together all of the various streaming platforms, and all of your own library content, and make that compatible across the widest possible range of devices, then Roon is the answer. Star Trek had the universal translator. Hitchhiker's Guide had the Babel fish. Streaming has Roon.
Yep, Roon is software, and it's kind of hard to break the mould of hardware dependency from old-school Hi-Fi habits. The idea of buying software takes something of a mental leap, particularly as you would expect any bit of hardware to come with the software to manage libraries and play lists and streaming sources etc. But buying into Roon liberates you from the poor software design inherent in most hardware.
There are a couple of decent primers
here.
