Hello to the Audioholics community! I am brand new to this forum so my apologies if this post is not in the correct forum thread. Any insights pointing to a possible culprit, or similar experiences would be greatly appreciated!
I am hoping that I can find a solution to the problem I seem to have with streaming music files. The situation is a consistent degradation in sound quality that I can best describe as a graininess, or “brown noise,” if you will, occurring in the lower mid-range. This occurs with lossy mp3, FLAC, and “HiFI” music from Spotify, and even MQA files from Tidal. Furthermore, this degradation seems to get worse as the streamed content goes further into the file (e.g. as time increases in the streamed file). As well, as the musical composition/complexity gets heavier the problem is exacerbated (network buffering?). There is no noise in the system I can detect and quiet passages, vocals, individual instruments, are all faithfully reproduced. I have taken downloaded streamed mp3 files and converted them to legally licensed FLAC files and the degradation is unchanged. I have found no changes to this problem by diagnosing my system as follows, changing one variable at a time:
Change Streaming source: Marantz SR 5012 to Bluesound Node 2i – NC; minimized network traffic by shutting down all other sources pulling on my network – NC; Swap-out speakers - NC; Swap-out output source: Marantz AVR to Integrated Amp - NC; Swap-out interlink RCA cables - NC; Replace Speaker cables - NC; Swap-out media interface: Android Tablet to Laptop – NC; Change interface App; Tidal App vs Spotify App vs BlueOS App – NC.
Playing mp3 files from a thumb drive does not exhibit the same degradation issues – they just sound like lossy mp3 files which is a completely different quality than the one I am describing. CD music comes across fine and my designated stereo listening speakers are of such quality that I can pick up poorly recorded CD’s that I have never heard from previous speakers using the same equipment.
This is making me nuts! At this point I am leaning toward a bandwidth and/or download speed problem with my current ISP plan. This would explain the unchanged problem with downloaded and saved streamed content converted to uncompressed FLAC files. I have not been able to find what would be considered the minimum download speed required to play back streaming content without issues.
My equipment: Marantz AVR SR-5012, NAD C 320BEE, Yamaha AX 592 integrated amp, Yamaha BD-S681 Blu-ray player, BlueSound Node 2i, Paradigm Studio 40 v3 speakers, Klipsch 650 speakers, Polk Audio RM 7500 speakers (surround), DIY 3-way tower speakers (my reference speakers, as it turns out). Network Provider: AT&T DSL (I know, but it’s about the only game in town here
), 2.4 & 5 GHz bands, ~200-700 Mbps (500 ave.) on the 5 GHz. Using LAN instead of WiFi.
My apologies for the length of this inquiry. I figure if I lay it all out there from the onset it might make things easier to diagnose without a lot of back and forth questions. Or not HaHa!
