Bluetooth and my system

[Tarbyarmy]

I usually play Spotify through an iPad air and Zeppelin Air in my bebroom or a JBL flip in the kitchen.

Have just bought an Arcam irDac for my main system and am enjoying the iPad hard wired but would like to add a Bluetooth receiver. System consists of Roksan radius 5 turntable, Unison Research S6 valve amp, Dali Suite 2.8 floorstanders and Naim CD 5i (so mainly used for vinyl/CDs)

Thinking of the Cambridge BT100, Arcam mini blink or Arcam rblink

Any thoughts?

 

[ChrisIRL]

I use the rblink with my ipad/ spotify and find it very good. The aerial helps with connection stability, I've had virtually no drop out in the year I've owned it. If not too late to return the irdac I would do so. The dac performance of the the rblink and the irdac is virtually indentical. The irdac certainly doesn't sound £350 better. I returned mine when I realised the rblink was good enough. You have no direct connection with the rblink though, maybe you need that.

 

[unsleepable]

If your source is Spotify, any Bluetooth receiver will require the music to be compressed a second time with lossy compression.

What about an Airport Express? You can connect it digitally to the irDac with a mini-TOSLINK to TOSLINK cable.

 

[ChrisIRL]

The rblink has a nice feature when streaming from Apple ios devices however. It will accept 256 aac without any further compression. The bluetooth stream will be the exact same as listening on the ipad itself, in fact better given the better dac within the rblink. I believe the spotify app streams in 256 aac also. If streaming from an aptx capable device quality improves even further. That said most people can't distinguish between 256 aac and CD quality anyway, or at least it takes very concentrated listening to hear a diiference.

 

[unsleepable]

The rblink has a nice feature when streaming from Apple ios devices however. It will accept 256 aac without any further compression. The bluetooth stream will be the exact same as listening on the ipad itself, in fact better given the better dac within the rblink. I believe the spotify app streams in 256 aac also. If streaming from an aptx capable device quality improves even further. That said most people can't distinguish between 256 aac and CD quality anyway, or at least it takes very concentrated listening to hear a diiference.

That's why I specifically referred to Spotify being the source. Spotify doesn't use AAC, but Ogg Vorbis. Even if the receiver could process this format, it wouldn't help because the stream is encrypted. Therefore, it must always be decrypted/decompressed and, if sent over Bluetooth, compressed once more.