Hi!
Brand new on here...and a relatively new audiophile.
My question is this - I own this wifi radio streamer from Sangean:
http://www.sangean.com/products/product.asp?mid=25&cid=2
I have it feeding into my wyred 4 sound st-500 amp and output in my Dunlavy SC-III speakers.
I'm finding that the sound quality is mediocre at best. Is there any sort of device that I can utilize between the streamer and the amp that could enhance the quality and convert the music into a HIFI signal?
Thanks,
John
johntheoptimist:
Welcome to the AH and I hope you enjoy your time here. There's plenty of help available on a myriad of topics. I hope to see you around the forums. This is a great topic with a lot of opinions available.
"I'm finding that the sound quality is mediocre at best. Is there any sort of device that I can utilize between the streamer and the amp that could enhance the quality and convert the music into a HIFI signal?"
I took a look at the Sangean as I am unfamiliar with that unit and a quick overview of the specs. It seems you have a decent amp in the ST-500 and decent speakers in the Dunlavy's. The Sangean appears to support MP3 and AAC as its primary audio formats. One of the sorry axioms of digital formats is that you can go from a high quality format and reduce it to a lesser quality format, but, you can't take a poor quality format like MP3 and dress it up or upscale it and make it a high quality format.
It would appear, and I'm no expert on the Sangean, that you are stuck with MP3 and AAC. If that's truly the case, no amount of lipstick will take that source and turn it in to anything other than what it is: the lowest common denominator in digital audio.
The key to high quality digital audio is a pretty simple recipe:
1. Get good quality recordings to start with. Format will not save a bad recording
2. Choose the highest quality digital format you can get (uncompressed & lossless is a good combo)
3. Make sure you keep the signal path short , sweet and digital : sitcking with HDMI or TOSLINK
If you can stream Spotify, you can get 320Kbps audio files that sound pretty darn good. If you can stream Tidal you can do the MQA stuff which also sounds pretty good. Many folks here on the AH rip their own CD's and maintain a media steamer to feed the amp. Its what I do. I don't want to get too long in my reply or get too far off topic. But, we can if you wish !