All CD’s were ripped directly to our N50-S38 using a D100 drive. So all connected Melco stuff, no third party equipment involved at all.
But that was your choice.
If you’d have used a streaming bridge between Melco and DAC, along with an optical spdif cable, the dac would have been isolated from the network.
Since when has that been a factor when choosing hifi. 
I don’t understand why anyone would buy a source that sounds the same as a source they already own. What’s the point.
I love roast potatoes, but I don’t eat them every day.
I’m not really familiar with streaming bridges. Two things however occur to me. Firstly, yes the DAC will isolated from network noise by virtue of an optical connection. However the Melco won’t be, and thus noise will still impact on things here. Also the streaming bridge itself is introducing possible degradation. It’s another component in the chain which won’t be perfect. As I say I’m not familiar with them but I’ve never heard of anyone using a Melco in that way and I’m not sure it even would work. I did consider an ADOT fibre kit which in effect achieves the same thing (or better in fact) by breaking the electrical connection between the network and the system. But it meant two additional SMPS’s and more wiring complexity and space was restricted. The SMPS’s themselves are noisy and the optical conversion again won’t be perfect and is a possible source of degradation - hence the option to upgrade to better power supplies for the ADOT components which sounds better. So it didn’t seem like a very eloquent solution in the end. Anyway all water under the (streaming?!) bridge now.
I see ,does the Melco confirm that the rip is accurate?
I’m not about to try and compel someone from one format to another. Pays your money makes your choice, but…
Having sold my CDX2/CPS2 after nearly 20 years of ownership to finally move to streaming I was retrospectively intrigued as to whether having the 2 sources, and specifically the network connection, would impact the CDP. I temporarily acquired a CDX2 from a local dealer and tried it first with streamer completely disconnected, then connected but off and then connected and on. Absolutely no difference in any scenario. Your mileage has clearly varied.
Reading that OP though it kind of screamed to me that you simply chose the wrong streamer and may have some network issues which it revealed.
Software as well as sound has to be a consideration. There are many here who love a bit of DBPowerAmp and farting about with #Tags until some kind of classification perfection or (more likely) annoying compromise is reached. Not me. Life’s too short and I CBA. No-one on their death bed is going to be lying there thinking “I wish I found a way to classify by conductor” or “Was that Indie or Indie Rock or Indie Pop?” Well maybe some will? Sad in my view.
The message I’m getting is that this is not you either. Fair enough. There are many other steamers out there with brilliant software and, much as I’m not a fan, I do also wonder whether Roon might have been your friend here.
The fact it was problematic to set up also leaps out. Go back a decade and many of these things required some basic networking knowledge to get going and hadn’t really considered the user interface at all. Sonos blew that out of the water and we’re now in a much better place. If you can’t just plug a streamer into an ethernet cable or connect by wifi in an instant then something is plainly amiss.
The final thing here was the switches. If your CDP sounds worse despite switches then you may simply have the wrong switches for your setup.
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No. It just rips and adds it to the internal library. I assume that it’s an accurate rip and that this is implicit in the whole Melco ripping process or presumably it would be rejected.
My choice was influenced by not wanting to stream across a network but rather from the Melco internal library directly to our Qutest DAC. Not many devices were available to do that and the Melcos were/are very well regarded by many for sound quality. In retrospect, if I were doing it again, I would probably go down the route of a Linn all-in-one streamer. But I’m all done with streaming now. I want to keep things as simple as possible and you can’t get much simpler than popping in a CD.
We had an EE8 and two EE1 isolators, two Chord Ground Arays in the BT Smart Hub 2 which was powered, along with the ONT box, via a Chord S6 mains block. The main system was plugged into a Chord M6 block with a Chord Power Aray. Also Chord Ground Arays in the Melco, Moon amp and Qutest DAC. I don’t think I could have done very much more to reduce noise of all kinds. It all made vast improvements to both streaming and CD replay but the gap in musicality between the two could not be closed.
I would suggest you purchase a very good and cheap streamer like Wiim pro or Bluesound node and connect it to your excellent Qutest DAC.
Then you can subscribe to Tidal and enjoy the wonderful world of streaming using Tidal Connect with tracks resolution and sound quality much better than CD.
I’m not saying Igel that streaming via Qobuz is better than cd playback as to be honest I can’t say but there’s not a lot in it sound quality wise…maybe streaming has the slight edge on SQ
We just love the convenience of streaming…think of a cd or vinyl that neither of us has and just play it
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Not entirely sure how any of this would help me. I’ve just got rid of a £5K streamer, it sounded musically inferior to CD as I’ve said and I’ve already stated that I have no interest at all in streaming from on-line libraries.
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So true.
But it’s likely one will be better sounding than the other, plus if you already have say an extremely good dac, then the one in the cd player isn’t likely going to be anywhere as good, so you then end up not using it.
Fatcat is using that term as an equivalent to a streamer in digital audio mode.. ie a streamer providing SPDIF to a DAC, just like a CD transport can provide SPDIF to a DAC.
However if there are errors in the data sent to the SPDIF which frames the original audio data, it will sound like an horrendous rasping noise, or extremely distorted. if there is an error in SPDIF transmission you will get drop outs or silence.
There CD and streaming are very noticeable of there are errors. Its more likely the there are differences in the source material - ie the conceded masters between streaming and CD
I mean the actual sound or sample data is not affected by this noise. The integrity of the data is fully maintained… clearly this is the case or for example if you were purchasing anything online you could be charged random amounts if the integrity of the data was not maintained. The same methods of data integrity are used for cloud streaming as well as online banking.
However the out of band interference - ie that interference that is not directly associated with the programme material/audio data itself can affect replay equipment and add either digital or analogue noise that interacts with the working of the replay equipment reducing the fidelity from that equipment. Sometimes the equipment itself can create its own noise that affects its fidelity, such as the noise of software executing.
I can see how an optical digital feed to a DAC from the streamer will prevent network noise impacting on the DAC and rest of the system but if the streamer still has an ethernet connection then network noise will still affect it’s performance. Seems to me that something like the ADOT fibre kits are a much more effective solution here since they break the entire system’s electrical connection to ethernet.
an optical connector can impede common mode electrical noise, but other forms of noise would be not affected such as source clock modulation noise that couples in the receiver’s electronics.
So fibre (and wireless) are ideal for impeding common mode electrical noise but dont reduce other forms of noise - and fibre can introduce its own noise (ie microphonic encoding jitter).
There is no panacea - all these methods if well designed however can be effective enough for high quality consumer hifi.
This topic is an example of Closed Systems engineering and control theory.
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How so? My ears tell me that it is. Otherwise the various steps I took to reduce it would have made no difference. They did.
Integrity of a digital audio data stream it seems to me is somewhat different to that of say online banking. By which I mean even if all the bits are present and correct there are tiny timing issues that are irrelevant to systems such as online banking. You clearly know a lot more about all this than I do and maybe I’m being very simplistic and missing some important points. Basically all I’m trying to say is that the various steps I took to reduce network noise were hugely beneficial to musical coherence in my sytem but were still not sufficient to make the Melco as musically satisfying as CD.
you would be hearing indirect interference on your replay equipment from a noisy source or leaky path…. if you notice a difference with the identical audio data.
You can use your ears for subjective assessment or actually measure the noise using specialist measuring equipment for objective measurement
How so ? Unless you are using lossy codecs you are violating the laws of entropy that all forms of communication rely on… and say on ethernet - the methods of TLS are the same for streamed audio as well as online banking…….. the key part is the ‘I’ in the CIA security Tennant of integrity.. of which all secure communications relies on
Without fully understanding all the technicalities my experience and gut feeling was that any connection to our BT Smart Hub 2 from our system was undesirable no matter how executed. Thus there is now no connection and we have even switched off wi-fi from the BT hub.