Tidal Streaming

Gregg - interesting, I also have the Grace m920, and love it!

The Grace M920 is an excellent unit with a lot of features, accessible by a clever and elegant rotary encoder! The sound has been described as "bracingly open."

For a different take on digital, consider the Burson Conductor SL 1793, available from Parts Connexion.   Burson Conductor SL
The Burson uses the BurrBrown 1793 chip, with Burson's well regarded discrete circuitry. It's also available with the same ESS 9018 chip as the Grace M920 as the Conductor SL 9018. For a hundred bucks extra, PcX will add a pre-amp out or a DAC out. The SL 1793 is warmer, more rounded than the Grace M920, but less precise and accurate. The SL 1793 is also about $1K cheaper. I like both units for what they each offer.     Burson Audio

If you are in doubt, the Emotiva XDA-2 represents good value; certainly better than anything stuck inside a noisy computer! Be sure to run your DAC into a VTA tube amp!!

Thanks,

Gregg R.

Note: If you worried about decoding DSD, JRiver MC 19/20 software will do it for you. The ESS 9018 chip decodes DSD internally.

IMO, the best value dac/preamp out there is the Emotiva DC-1, for $500.

Analog inputs and outputs, dual AD1955 dac chips per channel, and two headphone outs.

This looks great but I need a little help...

I want to stream with an iPad into my OPPO BDP95 so I can use the OPPO's DAC for best sound. Problem is that the OPPO does not have a Toslink connection. According to the Apple Express' set up instructions the USB out is only for printers??? Am I misunderstanding?

The Airport Express also has a dual purpose minijack, for mini-stereo or mini-Toslink.

You get a cable with the mini tousling at one end and the normal toslink at the other, or a mini to normal tousling adapter. Inexpensive in either case at Radio Shack.

Of course, the other end of the toslink cable goes to the BDP 95.

Then, you're in business!

Hi audiobill,

The BDP95 doesn't have a toslink input. It has USB 2.0 which I have used for an external hard drive in the past. I see it also has an Ethernet LAN Port. Will that work?

Oh, I'm sorry, you said that!

Looking at the BDP 95's user manual, I don't see any analog or digital inputs like the BDP-105 has. Not sure how you'd use the BDP-95's dac. I don't think the ethernet port will do it, that's for data transmission at rates different than digital music transfer to a dac. Just try the AE into your preamp or receiver either RCA or toslink. Does your preamp or receiver have that feature?

I use the USB input for digital files. So the question I have to get an answer to is: does the USB connection on the AE output digital audio?

No, for printer only.

AudioBill: Only bummer I'm having with Tidal at the moment is their rather limited repertoire viz. Spotify. They've obviously upgraded their servers recently so drop-outs are not an issue anymore, and the sound is indeed (even sans DAC) very, very good -- much better than Spotify's premium (beta for Linux) player. But I go to look for Graham Parker, for example, and there are like six cuts available, whereas I can get his entire library on Spotify. Are you aware of their plans to expand their library?

They have said they are continuously adding - in the meantime, choose "radio" for your favorite artists, and you'll be introduced to much new music you'll like from others!

After all, 25 million is a lot of tunes!