Hello
I have a Linn Lifestyle system and a Project turntable (and Phono Box). I want to be able to stream music from the Internet via laptop or iPhone through the speakers. What do I need to be able to do this. Maybe a simple question but although I work in IT and was at one point interested in HiFi the two have not met in my head until now.
There are any number of solutions. At the budget end you have folk cobbling together bits of gear from the likes of Raspberry Pii, and then using third-party controller apps. Some of the results are good, but you do get the feeling that the owner is going to be on tech support call-out 24/7 because a lot of this stuff is based on opensource coding which could change any minute. There's a decent primer
here
Less tech-fiddly are the various Bluetooth receivers for streaming using a phone or tablet. They work, but the audio quality via Bluetooth isn't all that even with the pseudo "Hi-Fi" variants of BT including aptX and aptX HD. There's a lot of transcoding going on to make the audio stream fit inside the limited bandwidth of Bluetooth. Using your phone as the streaming source also limits you (or at least your phone) to staying within 10 mtrs of the BT receiver. The results also rely on the phone having the same aptX / aptX HD support. If not, it'll fall back to one of the more basic versions of BT which don't sound as good.
All the above can be had for between £50 and £150 depending on how much work you're prepared to put in.
The market between £150 and £400 is kind of odd. There's a lot of
me too type products from unfamiliar names. The Achilles heel with many is the controller apps you download on to a phone or tablet. If this sucks -
which happens a lot with this section of the market because they don't spend enough on it or have the right skills - then the user experience becomes rather frustrating. One product that I think is worth looking at, and it's surprisingly inexpensive, is the
Yamaha WXAD-10 for around £170.
Some reviews get a bit sniffy that it doesn't work with the voice control from Google home. Neither does my turntable or CD player and the house hasn't exploded yet. IMO, this obsession with voice control is akin to buying a car based purely on the SatNav. It's a distraction from the core function. Slightly more genuine is that the WXAD-10 doesn't support Sony's DSD audio format. I guess if you see yourself buying lots of Hi-Res audio file downloads for storage on a NAS drive then yeah, this could be a legitimate concern. However, if your main interest is streaming stuff direct of the internet then it's neither here nor there.
At £400+ you start to get in to the territory of the bigger brands. The Sonos Port at £400 is a plug-in media streamer much like the Yamaha. Myself and many in the trade would acknowledge that Sonos has never been the last word in audio fidelity, but the brand has perhaps the best control app of all, and very wide support for streaming services. What's taken a bit of a shine off their products was a debacle about three years ago.
Sonos decided out of the blue to drop support for all their Gen 1 gear. That not only meant that they wouldn't repair it, but that it would no longer work. That's kind of scary. We expect obsolesce with operating software, but to see thousands of Pounds worth of multiroom audio gear built up over several years be rendered useless isn't something Sonos devotees took too kindly too. There was a mass outcry forcing Sonos to moderate their approach, and the compromise they announced was that the gear would still work but the software wouldn't have new features or file support added, and that it wouldn't be possible to mix-n-match Gen 1 and Gen II gear together. It still left a bad taste in the mouths of customers and dealers alike.
Sonos Port is the replacement for the original ZP80/ZP100 and Connect streaming players. Something seems to have gone backwards though in sound quality. I can't recommend it other than for adding Sonos connectivity to say an older AV receiver, a sound bar or amp feeding some outdoor speakers; areas where sound quality is less critical.
Sonos hit the UK market in roughly 2005 and it was a game changer. Yamaha had been doing multiroom audio earlier. So had Linn. Each used a wired network for connecting the streaming players back to a central media library, and that was a bit of a problem if you didn't want floors lifted and walls chased just to have some music in various rooms. Sonos used Wi-Fi wireless as well as wired.
A few companies have had a go at stealing the Sonos crown. They all came a cropper either on price, or the app, or both. Of the lower-priced rivals, Pure Jongo got closest, but it wasn't ever good enough. Meanwhile, from Canada, a company got started in 2013 with a different market in mind. They wanted to tap the Hi-Fi enthusiast market with something that worked as slick as Sonos but sounded better. That company is Bluesound. Their Node product (£550) is functionally equivalent to the Sonos Port, but shows it a clean pair of heels in terms of sound quality.
Above this you have products ranging in price up to £30,000(!) - Linn Klimax DSM - and some very high performing ones that do more than simply stream.
