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Any Chord Dave/M Scaler users recommend a streamer?

D

Dodgydoc

Active Member
I’m looking for a streamer to go with my Dave/M Scaler.
I want to be able to use Roon, Tidal or similar, AirPlay, and Internet radio. It must be as easy as possible for everyone in the house.
Auralic and DCS products look interesting but I’d like to hear about Dave owners own experiences.
 
I don’t have my Dave anymore but when I did I used a auralic Aries and it worked great. The user interface (lightening DS) is excellent and isn’t far behind roon in its functionality.

I still own a auralic Aries G1 and it works/sounds great.
 
I use a Naim streamer into Dave (but no M-Scaler), as I like their UI and have been using them for a while. I would look at the ND5XS2, as it has the same streaming board as the higher models, and will do native Tidal, Qobuz (soon), Spotify, Airplay, Chromecast and Roon. Sound quality is pretty much identical to NDX2 to my ears when used via SPDIF out.
 
Dodgydoc said:
I’m looking for a streamer to go with my Dave/M Scaler.
I want to be able to use Roon, Tidal or similar, AirPlay, and Internet radio. It must be as easy as possible for everyone in the house.
Auralic and DCS products look interesting but I’d like to hear about Dave owners own experiences.
Click to expand...
I’ve got a DAVE and MScaler. I use a little fanless Acer laptop with a 1TB SSD. £500ish. The lid is usually shut and it measures 29 x 21 x 2 cm. Negligible. I used to run JRiver with JRemote as the control app on my iPad and iPhone - my wife could easily do the same on her iThings. A couple of years ago I got into Qobuz, and now run it and Roon on the same pc, with great success. Again all controlled from a tablet or phone, though if I happen to be near my pc I can use it too. If I was starting again, I would do something similar. The Roon nucleus streamers seem expensive - I don’t need DSP or multi zones - as do offerings from Innuos and the like. If I wanted to spend loads of money I suppose I’d go for the top end Roon nucleus or an Innuos, there are some measurements on HiFi News that shows they may benefit some DACs (though not a DAVE). But as I am averse to the idea that fancy feet can improve a NAS I am unlikely to go that way, you can put £2k to far better use elsewhere. I’ve also got a little Squeezebox Touch, which I’ve had for years. A perfectly decent Roon endpoint, sounds magnificent, you can buy them for £100. Rob Watts has gone to extraordinary lengths galvanically isolating the DAVE and MScaler and giving it absurd levels of jitter rejection. If you trust him, then you only need choose a source for its convenience. A laptop has, over the years, given me plenty convenience and a lot of flexibility. No one knows for example how Amazon will affect the streaming landscape; they may be the only player in town in a couple of years. If that happens an Innuos or an Auralic will likely be an expensive paperweight. But my laptop will stream from Amazon, Qobuz, Tidal, Apple or whatever other show is in in town.
 
I’m a Dave and MScaler user. I have an Innuos Zenith on which I run Roon. It is set up to have a virtual Squeezebox Roon endpoint on the Zenith direct to the MScaler and then in other rooms I have various other endpoints all accessing the streamed and also stored ripped files on the Zenith.

it all runs faultlessly and I can copy and transfer music files from my Mac direct to the Zenith easily by accessing the zenith from my Mac over the network.

Roon is set up to play Qobuz and also to stream internet radio through the zenith to the MScaler or to any other endpoint.

As Innuos and others have shown, the streamer is important to the sound quality and that is why they pay so much attention to having low noise power supplies. Unfortunately it isn’t enough to just have an optical link to break the RF link because there is a ground loop for noise through the power supplies unless you use batteries which is far too much faff for me.

Innuos had a demo at their shows where they compared various of their streamers going into a Dave and the difference to my ears was profound.
 
No one knows for example how Amazon will affect the streaming landscape; they may be the only player in town in a couple of years. If that happens an Innuos or an Auralic will likely be an expensive paperweight. But my laptop will stream from Amazon, Qobuz, Tidal, Apple or whatever other show
Hadn’t thought of an Amazon effect......
 
Fourlegs said:
I’m a Dave and MScaler user. I have an Innuos Zenith on which I run Roon. It is set up to have a virtual Squeezebox Roon endpoint on the Zenith direct to the MScaler and then in other rooms I have various other endpoints all accessing the streamed and also stored ripped files on the Zenith.

it all runs faultlessly and I can copy and transfer music files from my Mac direct to the Zenith easily by accessing the zenith from my Mac over the network.

Roon is set up to play Qobuz and also to stream internet radio through the zenith to the MScaler or to any other endpoint.

As Innuos and others have shown, the streamer is important to the sound quality and that is why they pay so much attention to having low noise power supplies. Unfortunately it isn’t enough to just have an optical link to break the RF link because there is a ground loop for noise through the power supplies unless you use batteries which is far too much faff for me.

Innuos had a demo at their shows where they compared various of their streamers going into a Dave and the difference to my ears was profound.
Click to expand...
How is the Zenith connected to the MScaler, USB?
 
Fourlegs said:
Yes, the higher end Innuos units all use only USB because Innuos did measurements and found that a well executed usb had less noise than optical.
Click to expand...
Are those measurements public? Do you happen to know into which DACs they found their optical implementation noisier than their USB implementation? I am pretty sure if you check Rob Watts posts on gearslutz he uses optical as the gold standard for inputs and has to go to considerable lengths to make USB the same.
 
AndyU said:
Are those measurements public? Do you happen to know into which DACs they found their optical implementation noisier than their USB implementation? I am pretty sure if you check Rob Watts posts on gearslutz he uses optical as the gold standard for inputs and has to go to considerable lengths to make USB the same.
Click to expand...

I doubt they would make them public. Why would they as it is their research and mostly what happens is that people try to have a pop at stuff like that and shoot it down. Their demonstration that I went to had the Dave as they Dac connected to the servers.

One point is that if Innuos design and make a server with no or very low RF noise then the need for an optical RF break is reduced or possibly not needed and I can fully see that there might come a point where the optical conversion process merely adds more noise to the already low noise of the Innuos server.

ps, I follow RW on Headfi but I wasn’t aware that he posted on gearslutz. I’ll have a look.
 
Dodgydoc said:
No one knows for example how Amazon will affect the streaming landscape; they may be the only player in town in a couple of years. If that happens an Innuos or an Auralic will likely be an expensive paperweight. But my laptop will stream from Amazon, Qobuz, Tidal, Apple or whatever other show
Hadn’t thought of an Amazon effect......
Click to expand...
There’s no reason why Amazon Music couldn’t be integrated into streamers just as Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music etc. have in various different ways.
 
Whatsisnaim said:
There’s no reason why Amazon Music couldn’t be integrated into streamers just as Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music etc. have in various different ways.
Click to expand...
There is a very good reason why Amazon music couldn’t be integrated into other streamers. The reason is called amazon. They aren’t cooperating with Roon for example, and they don’t seem to be cooperating with most of the other streamer manufacturers either. They have their own Alexa based bits of hardware to flog.
 
Fourlegs said:
I doubt they would make them public. Why would they as it is their research and mostly what happens is that people try to have a pop at stuff like that and shoot it down. Their demonstration that I went to had the Dave as they Dac connected to the servers.

One point is that if Innuos design and make a server with no or very low RF noise then the need for an optical RF break is reduced or possibly not needed and I can fully see that there might come a point where the optical conversion process merely adds more noise to the already low noise of the Innuos server.

ps, I follow RW on Headfi but I wasn’t aware that he posted on gearslutz. I’ll have a look.
Click to expand...
Sorry, I meant headfi.

Why would it be possible to have a pop at a set of measurements? It is only because people like Innuos make seemingly preposterous claims without any evidence that people can take easy pops at them. If they put the numbers up, you couldn’t take a pop at them so readily. Hi Fi News publish measurements of the Innuos which clearly show a big improvement in jitter compared to a pc into a variety of (USB powered) DACs. Why can’t Innuos put up their numbers too? When they say sweepingly that “well executed USB has less noise than optical” why don’t you interpret that as “Innuos don’t know how to do optical”? I do. And God alone knows how they can design stuff that needs “asymmetrical isolation feet” to work properly.
 
So who’s got it wrong? Chord who think they’ve designed a DAC that can cope with the incoming bits, or the streamer companies who claim you need umpteen LPSUs to send a proper signal?
 
Alex S said:
So who’s got it wrong? Chord who think they’ve designed a DAC that can cope with the incoming bits, or the streamer companies who claim you need umpteen LPSUs to send a proper signal?
Click to expand...

don’t forget the “asymmetrical isolation feet”.
 
AndyU said:
Sorry, I meant headfi.

Why would it be possible to have a pop at a set of measurements? It is only because people like Innuos make seemingly preposterous claims without any evidence that people can take easy pops at them. If they put the numbers up, you couldn’t take a pop at them so readily. Hi Fi News publish measurements of the Innuos which clearly show a big improvement in jitter compared to a pc into a variety of (USB powered) DACs. Why can’t Innuos put up their numbers too? When they say sweepingly that “well executed USB has less noise than optical” why don’t you interpret that as “Innuos don’t know how to do optical”? I do. And God alone knows how they can design stuff that needs “asymmetrical isolation feet” to work properly.
Click to expand...

As always the proof is in the pudding. I’m not quite sure why you have leapt so quickly on your high horse but to my ears the Innuos gear sounds good with their chosen USB. I sort of gather that Innuos is not on your shopping list which is fine. We all vote with our wallets.

Alex S said:
So who’s got it wrong? Chord who think they’ve designed a DAC that can cope with the incoming bits, or the streamer companies who claim you need umpteen LPSUs to send a proper signal?
Click to expand...

Why does someone need to have got it wrong? The Chord gear clearly works well with a variety of inputs but why shouldn’t it be possible for it to give the best sound quality when fed with the best input? All I am saying is that I have heard different sound quality from the Dave when connected to different streamers. And yes in my experience the power supplies to streamers does make a difference to sound quality and that applies as much to the BlueSound Node 2i going into an older Arcam dac as well as more exotic stuff. I don’t see what the problem is with that.
 
It’s this that puts me off these upmarket streamers (aside from cost and obsolescence obvs). In addition to what seems like sound engineering (perhaps misplaced in a streamer), they seem to have a set of silly audiophile boxes that have to be ticked.
 
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