This is a review and detailed measurements of the 2021 Bluesound Node wired and wireless streamer and DAC. It is the next generation from
Node 2i which I reviewed a while back. The Node costs US $549 and was kindly drop shipped to me by a member. In case you don't know, Bluesound is from the same parent company as NAD.
The Node looks as attractive as the last generation:
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That said, I can't figure out anything on it. Hopefully the app helps.... Not!!! There is no remote so I downloaded the app to try to figure out how to change inputs. The app downloaded fine and prompted me to upgrade the unit. I let it and it spent some 10 minutes doing so! This is way too clunky. What on earth is it doing for 10 minutes? It rebooted but then nothing would work in the app. The gear icon would do nothing. And neither would the "VCR" (player controls). It thought it was all well but it clearly could not communicate with the unit. I restarted it and the unit and still nothing. I gave up.
The back panel shows rich set of connections:
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Inclusion of eARC over HDMI is very nice as is triggers for integration into the rest of your system. I used Ethernet for testing but there is also Wifi and Bluetooth.
Bluesound Node Meaurements
Roon nicely recognized the unit as an approved endpoint so I used it to stream by 24-bit, 1 kHz tone to get our familiar dashboard view:
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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:
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For good or bad, this is almost identical to what Node 2i performance.
Wanting to make sure it was not a pipeline shrink to 16 bits or something, I hooked up the
Topping D30Pro to its Coax output. Performance shot way up to what the D3Pro produces on its own:
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So you do have the option of adding a much higher performance DAC to it.
Surprisingly, the dynamic range is not too bad on the internal DAC:
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Jitter spectrum is also clean although likely masking fair bit due to high noise floor:
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Since my Audio Precision analyzer can't control the device directly, I don't have much else I can measure. But I think we know how the internal DAC performs anyway.
Since the app did not work, I had no way of characterizing the input performance even though I was all cabled up and ready to measure!
Conclusions
From pure performance point of view, the Node 2 is a disappointment. OK, I cut it fair bit of slack but come on folks, it needs to at least clear the CD hurdle of 96 dB. Adding fair bit of aggravation was the non functional BlueOS control application. The fact that it didn't work was one thing. But not saying anything when it could not control the unit is something else.
Anyway, I can't recommend the Bluesound Node from performance point of view or reliability of its App. If you use an external DAC, then it works well assuming you can get the app working.
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