Seriously, seriously impressed with Amazon Fire TV for music...

[Gazjam]

Was using my Oppo to stream video from my server to the big TV in the livingroom, but after forgetting to cancel my Amazon Prime suscription (oops...) I wanted a way to watch Amazon video on the big telly in the livingroom.

Figured hey, I've got it for a year now so might as well get the most out of it.
A few good TV shows on Amazon, so bought one of their Fire TV boxes to let me watch Amazon content.

The older version of the box had an optical out, the new one doesn't.
Not a problem as the audio feed would go via Hdmi into the telly so would be good quality anyway.

I have an Oppo bluray player which has an Hdmi INPUT, and previously I had fed my Virgin Media Tivo box into it, allowing the Virgin box to take advantage of the Oppo's Darbee picture processing and topnotch digital output to my Dac.
So plugged the Fire TV box into the Oppo's Hdmi input, sat back and put a film on.


Sound quality is SERIOUSLY good, a big solid soundstage, crystal clarity and that X-Factor that makes you sit on the edge of your seat listening.
Quelle surprise!

Genuinely taken back and egged on by this, I wondered how good streaming Amazon Music (part of the Prime suscription) might be?
No idea about bitrate, samplerate or whatever but you know what, it sounds that good it really doesn't matter.
In some ways...and some pretty fundamental ways...it matches and even exceeds what I'm hearing from my Logitech Transporter playing FLACs via Roon fed to the Dac.
There's a sense of being there, of instruments being "reach out n touch" real that makes you forget the hifi stuff and want to hear music you know again, and new stuff that you don't.

Amazon music is great for this, it suggests playlists based on your listening history and being Amazon, the catalogue to choose from is vast and wide.
I have listened to and enjoyed stuff I genuinely would never have thought to look into, just because what I'm hearing sounds so "just right".

Last night I did a direct comparison with albums I know well streamed from Amazon music and played from Roon with the Transporter...
Amazon is better.

Shouldn't be the case...an £80 android box WTF???
Exactly, it shouldn't be...the Fire TV is NOT a better digital source than my Transporter, so why is it my preferred digital source now?
SOMETHING is going on here, but what?
This has made me get the thinking cap back on and get my Engineering Curiosity head back on again.

Most obvious significant difference is the Network Infrastructure...how the two different ways of feeding the music files to the Dac might be affecting the outcome.
I'll get to the bottom of it.
Theres a phenomenon at work here...but what exactly is it?
Any theories or thoughts peeps?

First step is Network galvanic isolation.
With the Amazon box, the music files aren't being sent over 20m of Cat6 network cable as with the Transporter picking up files from my server so first port of call Network Isolation (as detailed by Andrew Everard, a guy who's opinion I trust) HERE:
https://andreweverard.com/2015/06/08...h-added-fibre/

Some tinkering and experimentation beckons!

(Oh, can the "it's only 1s and 0s so it doesn't matter" folks sit this one out please...experience has shown me that like a lot of things in hifi its never as simple as something you have read on the internet )

Digital audio's got me curious again!