Wow. This place is educational!
After reading the glowing reviews all over the internet about the Bluesound NODE (Gen 3), I finally put it in my shopping cart last Friday. Then I discovered this place, and this review-
This is sad. There is a lot of distortion which in this day and age is just not acceptable. I looked up the DAC chip and it is the TI PCM5242. Sadly it is specified at 94 dB SINAD at -1 dBFS. So it is bad to start with but the Node knocks a few more dBs from that, landing it straight in our "poor" bucket of DACs in red
And decided not to buy it.
I should mention that this is my first serious attempt at getting into streaming. Since I am new to it, I don't know exactly what I will want or need. The Bluesound looks to have an epic laundry list of features-
Supported Audio File Formats: MP3, AAC, WMA, WMA-L, OGG, ALAC, OPUS
Supported Hi-Res Audio File Formats: FLAC, MQA, WAV, AIFF, MPEG-4 SLS
Apple AirPlay 2, aptX HD Bluetooth
I'm mainly doing this to finally try some hi-res streaming. Maybe TIDAL or Qobuz or Roon.
But back to the bad DAC performance. Who wants that? After reading through this whole thread, it sounds like I can get better results by using an external DAC. My P6 preamp has an ESS Sabre32 Reference DAC. I think both optical inputs might be full, but I can run coax out on the Bluesound and into my preamp that way.
What else- I won't be using USB and I do have an iPhone. I'll also be on Wi-Fi only, as my networking gear is in a different room and I can't run an ethernet cable to the Bluesound.
So given that I already have what should be a nice DAC sitting around, and I think this has all the features I need, should I give the Bluesound a try?