Bluesound Node Wireless Multi-Room High Resolution Music Streamer - Black

This has only been a few days into having this hooked up to my system and I am very glad I got it. I was streaming music from tidal and Spotify then using Bluetooth to get the music to my system. I wanted to remove the need for Bluetooth. I was immediately impressed by the huge improvement on sound quality. Let's see if I am still happy in a month or two... I think I will be.

I am very pleased with this purchase! It can be difficult to figure out how to improve sound or resolve issues when your audio equipment is a little old but not so old that it makes sense to just replace it. The Node turned out to be the solution I was looking for. I'll walk thru the steps I took in case it helps someone else in a similar situation.I have wireless Yamaha MusicCast speakers . . . specifically the MusicCast 50 and some older generation wx-030 speakers. You can access several of the major streaming services using the MusicCast software and the speakers alone. However due to some issues with the MusicCast software, I had switched to using MusicCast app on my android phone and transmitting to the speakers via bluetooth for my SiriusXM subscription. The older speakers use a very old version of bluetooth and there were occasional dropouts but I had mostly resolved that problem with some tweaks to my router settings. Also, playing any files already downloaded to my phone to any of the yamaha speakers worked fine with Bluetooth -- it was only streaming that was an issue.Then I subscribed to a streaming service called IDAGIO which is a very good service for classical music only. It provides a large library for on-demand streaming and a high-quality file stream. IDAGIO is far superior to the limited classical offerings on SiriusXM which is not really aimed at classical music listeners. MusicCast software doesn't support IDAGIO but you can run app on an android phone and transmit via bluetooth just as I had done for SiriusXM. Unfortunately the higher-quality stream was generating regular dropouts in the audio from my speakers. I wasn't sure if the problem was my phone or in the version of bluetooth supported by the yamaha speakers but after a brief experiment with connecting my phone to the MusicCast 50 via a cable from the phone's headphone jack, I decided to look for a device that could pull the stream from the internet and connect to the MusicCast 50 via either analog or digital cables. The Bluesound Node was listed on the IDAGIO site so I thought I'd give it a try.The dropouts disappeared when using the Node. The sound quality is very good. Also, the Blueos app supports a very long list of streaming services if I want to experiment with any other services in the future. The cable connection to the MusicCast 50 means that audio never drops out and using wifi (instead of bluetooth) from the 50 to send music to the older wx-030 speakers means no dropouts there either. Also, the stream from the Node to my Bluetooth headphones (Bose Quiet Comfort 35 ii) sounds very good.People like me who use wireless speakers can't really throw around pretentious descriptions of audio quality but this sound just fine to me. I don't need high volume or a thumping base line -- I would just like to hear the quality of the voices and instruments as accurately as possible without trying to run cables all over the house. This product was just what I wanted.

great music server. i have an external ssd with all my music files plugged directly into it. easily controlled by smartphone or laptop app.

I received an item that was Clearly a previous return. This seems to be common on Amazon these days. It doesn’t impact the way it sounds though so I decided to just keep it.Comparing this to the Wiim Ultra and the Wiim pro plus (both wiims sound the same to me), I feel like the bluesound has a noticeably better sound. I would not say it’s night and day, and it depends on the song, but overall I would say that it sounds a bit more crisp, and has a bit more detail in the higher frequencies. I am streaming Spotify to a pair of high end bookshelf speakers. I know most reviewers use something like Tidal, but I’ve already had Spotify for a while with family on my account and don’t want to pay for another service and rebuild my playlists. But even with Spotify I’ve been able to hear noticeable differences between streamers.

I have a PowerNode which works very well. I bought this to connect to an existing receiver and ran into two problems. First, setting this up on the wifi network and to communicate with my Tidal and Roon accounts took multiple attempts lasting several hours in total. At the end, it was set up but for the life of me, I cannot tell you what i did differently other than factory reset repeatedly and walk through the same steps. Once that was completed, I had headphone access but only a very faint tinny sound through my receiver. Ive checked out multiple other causes again over several hours of switching out various components to try and isolate the issue with no luck. So this is now an expensive doorstop. And btw the BluOs app is very clunky and difficult to navigate but at least with my Roon I can avoid it, so that's at least one blessing.

It was good came when it was supposed to

Easy to set up & operate with other dac. It does what I wanted.