Bluesound Node Icon Streamer Review

[JeremyFife]

Thanks for another highly anticipated review.

I'm left flat (disappointed really) by this. I'm pretty sure it will sound good - and Dirac is cool. It's quite a lot of money for "meh" though.

That filter is silly.

Full disclosure: I never got along with the Bluesound app, that's me though.

 

[Rja4000]

And that argument about CONTROLLED and BLIND test environment, makes me more and more nauseous.
Why ?
Because only a happy few can achieve such environment for testing and measuring purposes.
But in real life NO ONE WOULD EVER be in a permanent controlled and "blind testing" environment.

True.
And then ?

The only thing I'm saying is that providing feedback on personal "sound quality" experience is useless and misleading if not done properly.

Because it's not reproducible and it's 99.9% likely to not be objectively related to a sound-wave-translated discernable difference.

This is the method used by (way too many) people to "prove" power cables and ethernet switches sound different. We know it's BS.
Same method - and same level of confidence here.

 

[Mort]

Can't get excited at this price and I've always thought blusound had terrible UX.

 

[darth]

I never understood why they have a touch panel over what should have been a touch screen. If I have to look in two places while doing a touch action, that's just poor accessibility. Not to mention my hand might cover the screen. Likewise for font color on the back.

Another thing that didn't work for me was the USB out functionality (connected to a USB/AES DDC ) with volume control. Node icon switched to fixed volume and wouldn't let me volume control.

 

[Sokel]

Hideous filter choice (cause it IS a choice), one cannot avoid the comparison with proper ones like the Bricasti for example.
Combined with the very poor EQ filter performance down low that plaques such devices as we saw at the other review thread, in my mind is close to unusable.

Thanks Amir!

 

[Vreek Fonq]

AES Convention Papers Forum » The Audibility of Typical Digital Audio Filters in a High-Fidelity Playback System

The AES Forum is where our members get to interact with each other in between conferences and section meetings.

secure.aes.org

JSmith

And even then there is a lot of debate about the parameters of this study.

 

[aptx78]

Why spend $ 999 on a streamer ? Why not spend the same on a Marantz Model M1 and get a streamer + DAC + amp ?

 

[ObjectiveSubjectivist]

There is a nice large display but doesn't support touch which is strange in this day and age. Instead there are a set of touch buttons on top. I

Yes it looks kinda cheap.
But I understand choice of placing buttons on top instead of touch screen (but should be both to be honest)
When you reach streamer and it's standing on some kind of low rtv cabinet it easier to reach buttons on top not swiping and touching front plate.
At least that's how I see it.

 

[Haskil]

Why spend $ 999 on a streamer ? Why not spend the same on a Marantz Model M1 and get a streamer + DAC + amp ?

Why ?
Because Heos is a painful application to use, its UpnP-DLNA implementation is so basic that you can't even fast forward through a piece of music, it doesn't integrate Qobuz, it isn't even capable of multichannel streaming even though it is mostly installed on integrated home theaters...
I know: I have Heos which is the Stone Age

 

[win]

I just want an all digital streamer with digital input select, Roon compatibility, and a case and screen that look appropriate on top of, rather than inside of the media credenza. Otherwise I'll just use my raspberry pi and iPad Roon app...

 

[AdrianusG]

Streamers are the one component which befuddle me the most--particularly their pricing. This unit is a streamer DAC costing $999 USD. Is there any reason to believe it's sonically superior to using a Google Chromecast Audio with, say. a Topping D10? That combination should run less than $200, or one fifth the price of this unit. Never mind the bells and whistles, any reason to believe it does a better job of conveying the signal? Or, for that matter, is it superior to a PC and a USB Dac? or a RPI with a hat?

And its filter is terrible, which means ultrasonic noise when rendering 16/44, which is the large majority of all music. How could they get something so basic, so wrong?

The basic function of this thing is to transmit digital LPCM streams from a router to a DAC, no DSP, no bass management, no PEQ, so why are all these streamers so stratospherically priced? Piggybank Panther seems well deserved in almost every case!

As always, very thorough and professional review, Amir. So thank you.

They didn't, they are just pushing MQA oh i'm sorry, my bad QRONO on the gullible again.

 

[Multicore]

I found it super confusing, taking me almost 15 minutes to figure out how to change inputs!

We had a Node for a week or two back in 2020 and returned it for this reason. Changing inputs requires do much fuss. I know having too many IR remotes is a bother but it's better than this.

 

[Multicore]

Full disclosure: I never got along with the Bluesound app, that's me though.

Me neither. Not only you.

 

[telemike]

Gosh, the WiiM Ultra has a 192/24 ADC option and all this can do is 44.1/16 in 2025? Plus, the Ultra has auto-sensing input changes in addition to being able to change inputs easily. I have a CD transport connected to Optical and my turntable in the Phono input on the Ultra

 

[Mnyb]

The product is entirely possible to fix with software, if they choose to do soo.

The actual hardware box has tremendous potential.

Subwoofer integration and Peq and dirac and DAC and preamp rolled in one whats not to like

The sloppy engineering

Price is ok to for a well supported brand i can buy in stores a walking distance from home.

Re the silly filter i sort of get the 24khz compromise for redbook and 48k others are using.

There is proper math that exactly answers what gives the best reconstruction of the signal . You don’t even need to measure it’s entirerly knowable from theory.

There can actually be pathological use cases with wrongly sampled signals for this filter otherwise it looks like setting pi=3.1 and be happy about it

 

[pjug]

Gosh, the WiiM Ultra has a 192/24 ADC option and all this can do is 44.1/16 in 2025? Plus, the Ultra has auto-sensing input changes in addition to being able to change inputs easily. I have a CD transport connected to Optical and my turntable in the Phono input on the Ultra

No, the Icon does higher sample rates and bit depth. If you otherwise like this streamer but are frowning on QRONO, the thing to do is upsample 44K and 48K files externally with a proper filter, e.g. using Roon.

 

[Jimbob54]

$700 over the Wiim ultra and the only meaningful difference I can see is XLR out?

 

[JoetheLion]

$700 over the Wiim ultra and the only meaningful difference I can see is XLR out?

Dirac.

 

[Thomas Savage]

Thanks for this review Amirm , I'm a bit disappointed in the results. Even more so in the BS rationale given for the nonsense filter.

Im a bit blue about Bluesound brand .

 

[ISchmidt]

Gosh, the WiiM Ultra has a 192/24 ADC option and all this can do is 44.1/16 in 2025? Plus, the Ultra has auto-sensing input changes in addition to being able to change inputs easily. I have a CD transport connected to Optical and my turntable in the Phono input on the Ultra

Just to clarify, on the Node Icon there is also auto-sensing for the inputs,