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better than Chromecast audio
You won’t get that with anything Bluetooth - the streaming codec itself is the quality bottleneck.
Dramatic_Hammer-
This... Bluetooth is inherently bad
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You won’t get that with anything Bluetooth - the streaming codec itself is the quality bottleneck
Whilst true, it's far more complex than that... it's also about the sender capabilities. Which codec is chosen and how it performs is a negotiation between client device and the bluetooth receiver: https://www.soundguys.com/understanding-bluetooth-codecs-15352/
However I'm not replacing my wired setup, I'm finding a place between that setup and the ChromeCast. Do I think the ChromeCast audio is doing a good job on Wi-Fi with higher bandwidth? In principle yes, but in practice I think that the DAC in the ChromeCast is actually the weak spot.
When I use the wired setup my system is superlative, and with the ChromeCast it's OK but nothing special. Bandwidth and latency on Wi-Fi isn't the problem so what is? Well it could be the source files (Spotify, Google Audio... or transcoding by Plex)... but it could also be the DAC.
What I want to find out through experimentation is whether aptX HD from my phone to a bluetooth receiver with a good DAC produce an overall better listening experience on my existing stereo than I feel I get from the ChromeCast. I grant that it is compressing the signal to fit in the bandwidth, but with Spotify et al the source is compressed to fit in the transit bandwidth... so if both sources are compressed, what does the better job at unpacking the audio and turning it into an analog signal for the amplifier?
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ChainBreaker
Velocio
neu
Pretty much yeah.
And because I have good audio locally on Plex but wish to play and cast to my stereo from my phone.
If I leave everything as source quality and have a high quality Bluetooth DAC I can achieve this.
I want better than Chromecast audio, and yet can be used as an external speaker to home automation stuff for low quality party music.