Hi all!
At first, compliments for all the good objective reviews with detailed measurements ! Nice to see there are also review places where cables not magically make stereo from mono.
I have the following setup:
LG Oled55C8 - > Optical out -> Musical Fidelity V-Dac 2 -> Marantz SR6001 -> B&W CM9 (stereo pair, I went away from surround long ago)
I mostly stream music from spotify using my tv.
I was wondering if it was worth to upgrade to a stand-alone streamer instead of using my TV as streamer. Therefore I borrowed a U24XL USB audio interface to do some measurements. I know, it's not an AP, but if it is really bad, I will see it was the idea.
So I connected the output of the V-DAC to the U24XL and I played a 1KHz tone from spotify. The results were shocking. More interesting, if I play a 1KHz tone from youtube, all seems fine!
I checked if I was not clipping the U24XL, but it wasn't. Turning down the volume did not changed the the relative strength of the harmonics. The youtube tone is quiter, but I can put it to the 0dBr before seeing clipping issues.
I used " Audiolab - Audio Test Tones" and " Pure Tone 1000 Hertz - Signal" on spotify and both gave the same results.
Does someone know why spotify seems to perform so badly? Shocking is, I enjoyed it all that time, wondering if I am just used to it or if there's going something wrong with my measurements . .
Edit: I now listened to my normal setup and I can clearly hear spotify distort where youtube don't (with the test tones) Also streaming through my chromecast dongle instead of using the spotify app on my tv give the same result . . .
Yes - spotify is that bad . Dont use it . Dont pay for it. It should be for free. Its not even hifi.
What you see is the lossy codec of audiolabs test tone record from spotify. Its useless to make measurements using Spotify.
In the movie and TV world, everything is sampled at 48 kHz . Music is often 44.1 kHz . The chance that a TV have a good SRC is very low. Its probably the cheapest solution one can buy .
I have , ofcourse, tried a TV as source and also an Apple tv v.5. The Apple TV sounded slightly better , but the leap to a yamaha wxc50 is clearly audible where the Yamaha , without being especially good, is a better sounding streamer with spotify as source. Using a TV as a streamer is not likely to produce a good sound.
A chromecast dongle is a very bad sounding solution. If youre not using ROON as a source , the jitter results are like from a horror movie. Look at the review here on audiosciencereview.
You can do much better soundwise with a dedicated streamer like WiiM (99 dollar ) , and slightly better than that with a laptop and a good, dedicated DDC.
The test tone from audiolab via Spotify and your LG tv seems to have a SINAD of…. 30 .
Here is chromecast without ROON :
Here is WiiM :
The sence morality of this is : dont use lossy codecs for hifi and dont use stuff thats only made for 48 kHz, as a streamer for music.