Great looking system Jeff
Now that you have had the stream magic in your system for a while has it settled down to an even better sound?
Does it still make you want to play it at every opportunity or is the CDT-100c going back in place?
I am In two minds now whether to sell my XRay Cd player to pay for a similar set up and go down the same sort of route.
Regards
Chris
Hi Chris,
If you think it looks good, you should hear how it sounds!!
Honestly, the only downside is visual. I have replaced a stunning mixture of solid aluminium, stainless steel, Plexiglas and 4 glowing valves with a boring silver-coloured box.
At least the Dac in the Stream Magic is top quality and I am very pleased with the sound. It is definitely better than the sound I was getting with CD on my CDT-100c.
The other stuff it can do is also very impressive if you are into that sort of thing. You can listen to all sorts of 'pod-casts' from all sorts of stations (mainly BBC ones).
Obviously there are the usual 15 million internet radio stations listed alphabetically starting with Afghanistan, Azerbaijan etc. Anyone fancy "Hitradio Namibia"??
There are, according to the Stream Magic, 1018 internet stations that it can 'tune in to' in the UK alone! 1018!! (How about Allhallows Community Radio, or Canterbury Student Radio?)
Obviously you can program in pre-sets for your favourites. One of my favourites is
of course "Radio Turkmenestan 2".
You can also hook up off-board HDD's or memory sticks and listen to their content.
There is all sorts of streaming stuff it can do - Aupeo, Live 365, MP3Tunes, BBC i-player radio. One downside on this was its lack of native support for Last FM, a service I really like. For anyone that's unsure what it is, its a "Radio" service whereby you type in all your favourite artists and it can either play various tracks from just them, or you can set it to also play tracks from artists similar to your favourites. So you get to hear other stuff along the lines of what you like. Of course you can set it to play anything and everything as well, if you like. And no mindless DJ "chat", no adverts for someone trying to sell you carpets or whatever, just uninterrupted music, all day, every day. For this service, I pay the princely sum of £3 a month, on a rolling contract, so you can opt out (and in)whenever you like.
Anyhoo, it's not in Stream Magic's extensive menu. I can receive it on my Nexus 7, of course, and then use it's 3.5mm audio jack to pipe the sound to my amp. But I didn't like to tie my Nexus down with a cable, since it's so nice to be able to play your music with what is effectively your remote control, but then to use the same thing to go to 'Heaven' and see the latest comedy questions from our Meercat friend. So I contacted Cambridge Audio who told me that I could buy their dedicated Bluetooth receiver - the BT-100 - and stream Last FM from my Nexus to the BT-100 which plugs into the rear USB of the S-M. This would then upsample the signal to 24/384, which would make the very lo-fi Bluetooth at least sound listenable.
And the price for this BT-100?
£70 please sir.For a Bluetooth receiver?Admittedly, it had the latest Bluetooth protocol, APT-X, but I only use it for background music during the day. A quick scour of Amazon produced a lovely little receiver for around a tenner which powers from a USB jack, and outputs via a 3.5mm socket which I use with a '3.5mm to RCA' straight into my amp.
So both my Asus Nexus dock and my BT receiver go into a USB hub which goes into a USB port at the back of the S-M. This allows me to lift my 'remote control' from it's dock to surf, or navigate to one of the 715 albums ripped so far.
Nearly halfway!! Hurrah!! But still ripping . . . and ripping . . . and ripping.
As for use, I have been listening to it every night since I got it. I can't describe how natural it feels to call up a list of albums on a screen, choose what one you want to hear and then press play. Simple as that!! I really wouldn't want to go back to CD anymore. I reckon it's a bit like when colour TV first came out (if you're an old fart like me and remember that), there must have been people saying "Don't need it, black and white is fine", but after a couple of days of colour you knew you couldn't go back. You just couldn't go back. It's like that for me. My SQ (most importantly) has gone up a notch, and my usability, convenience and feature count has gone through the roof.
I repeat, I wouldn't go back to having my 1's and 0's on one thousand eighteen hundred individual 700MB polycarbonate discs
anymore.
I have the same 1's and 0's stored on two HDD's in a nice white box which sits behind my sofa connected to my router. I have my 1's and 0's on two 3TB Western Digital 'Red' HD's (the Red's are manufactured to be more robust and are intended for heavy-duty use in NAS drives). The NAS I bought, although from the domestic section of Synology's catalogue, again is built for hard use. I contacted them concerning this and they assured me it was good for 24/7 use without being turned off.
I have set it up to hibernate the drives after an hour of inactivity so they power down overnight. Probably 'over-spec-ing' (is that a word?) on my part, but better safe than sorry. They are configured in RAID 1, where one HD mirrors the other.
The whole set-up was a lot easier than I feared and took me no more than 3 or 4 hours spaced over a couple of days. I have had no trouble (touches a large piece of wood!) whatsoever, since I set it up.
At the moment, I'm listening to Younger Brother 'A Flock of Bleeps' at the moment, and it sounds superb. Mick (Heliharris) put me onto Younger Brother - Thanks Mick!
Chris, there are lots of ways to go down the streaming path, if you know what I mean. I had originally thought of a Squeezebox Touch, into a good DAC, and that is certainly one way of doing it.
Derek Rumble (Hifidez) who posts on RG, uses a Squeezebox system. He just hooks up a 'current' portable HD and plays from that, and for safety, manually backs up to a 'Master' HD on a regular basis or when anything new is added.
From all reports SQ is excellent, although heavily dependent on your choice of DAC, I would imagine. That seems a perfectly good and sensible system, although not for me.
There are various systems using Apple gear, but I absolutely point-blank refuse to be tied in to i-tunes, so they were out from the start.
There are also various network players from the likes of Denon, Sonos (a bit over-priced I thought), Pioneer (I liked the N-50, I think it was called), and most other hi-fi companies now. They're all jumping on the band-wagon, including Hi-End companies, like, as you mention earlier, Naim, and also Linn. If you'd like to go Cambridge Audio, (which surely has an astronomical bang-per-buck ratio), but are a bit unsure, there is a less expensive option, the NP-30. I can't honestly remember at the moment the differences between the NP-30 and the S-M, but I think they mainly concern the DAC side of things. Best to check if you were thinking about this. The NP-30 is IIRC 'only' £300 or so, but by all accounts (and like most Cambridge Audio equipment), worth every penny and then some.
I realise you might be a little unsure about something like this, as it seems a big step, but I can honestly say I don't regret my decision for one minute.
I will try to give you (and anyone else contemplating the same journey) the benefit of my recent experiences, for what they're worth. If you have any questions at all Chris, (or anyone else), feel free to ask, and I will try to answer as best I can.If I can set up a system like this - anyone can. To give you an idea of the extent of my technical knowledge, I'll let you in to one of the best-kept secrets in Hi-Fi. You often hear technical types like Frans and Javier talking about capacitors, op-amps, psu's etc., well they don't fool me!! I know for a fact (don't we all?) that all these various boxes contain Magic Music Pixies who are the ones who actually make the music.
Concerning going the streaming route, all I can say is - "Come on in, the water's lovely!!"