Upgrade amp or add a streamer..?

[npxavar]

Sounds interesting, do you what it's model name is etc?
I've decided I'm not in a hurry. I'm fighting the mistaken need to upgrade my amp too. I've got Roon streaming through the Connect into the amps built in dac and it sounds perfectly good with a bit of room correction.

EDIT: It's a NAD CS1. Has an onboard DAC, and SPDIF coax and optical out. No app, so no bluesound, it's operated from the native apps, and is Roon ready. So you can stream directly from the Tidal or Spotify apps, and use Roon or something like Bubble for Qobuz. It's still £300 though, that's £280 more than the used Connect I'm using.

If you stop using the inbuild DAC of your amp you will find yourself with a better amp. I would stay away from NAD CS1 without a listen. A cheap option would be to get a Cambridge Audio DAC Magic and connect it to your tablet with a USB cable. You can control playback with a smartphone/PC when using Tidal and Spotify, I don't know about other services.

 

[manicm]

If you stop using the inbuild DAC of your amp you will find yourself with a better amp. I would stay away from NAD CS1 without a listen. A cheap option would be to get a Cambridge Audio DAC Magic and connect it to your tablet with a USB cable. You can control playback with a smartphone/PC when using Tidal and Spotify, I don't know about other services.

The NAD CS1 has an acclaimed DAC, has both Spotify and Tidal Connect - the latter with full MQA decoding, Airplay, Chromecast, DLNA and Bluetooth. I would take it over an older DAC Magic.

 

[SteveR750]

The NAD CS1 has an acclaimed DAC, has both Spotify and Tidal Connect - the latter with full MQA decoding, Airplay, Chromecast, DLNA and Bluetooth. I would take it over an older DAC Magic.

I Owened a dacmagic for years, great piece of kit, but I really don't think it's any better than the one in my amp.
The NAD looks interesting, especially as I'm considering switching from qobuz back to standard Tidal as I don't really see the value of hi res. I can stream Spotify and tidal via their connect feature, and Roon if I want DSP. I could stream Spotify from a laptop and use the Equalify DSP plug in, so all bases covered. However, I can do all of that already, so the issue is whether the nad processor is better than the one in the Connect. I know from ASR that the connect suffers from a bit of distortion, and needs to have its input stream set to 16/44 otherwise it truncates a 24 bit file and creates a bit of a mess. This explains why qobuz 24 bit tracks sounds better streamed from Roon rather than through the sonos app, as Roon is doing the conversion.