It feels as though we’ve now accepted streaming and welcomed it into the hi-fi community. Fears were real, and often founded, that it would replace physical media to detrimental effect, offering up inferior performance in return for perceived convenience.
In many ways, though, music streaming has helped us fall in love all over again with those cumbersome old discs. Being able to throw music from your palm to your speakers can be wonderful, but our desire to savour an album’s cover artwork and actually hold it has far from been quelled. That speaks for vinyl more than CD, of course, even if sales of the silver disc are, would you believe, somewhat on the rise.
And actually, it’s the rise and ubiquity of CD-quality streaming, not to mention the ever-increasing range of hi-res streaming options, that means you no longer need physical media for decent sound.
So yes, you really can have it all. That’s why this piece is titled ‘How to add a music streamer to your existing hi-fi system’, and not ‘How to replace it’ or ‘How to get the best price for your CD player on eBay’. This is all about complementing, rather than replacing, your existing kit.
What do we mean by a music streamer, anyway? Essentially it’s any source component that allows you to play music wirelessly — from a streaming service app and/or network storage device — to your hi-fi system. Many streamers work with Bluetooth as well, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here; we want this device to use our home network rather than have
