How To Add A Streamer To Your Hi-Fi System

Upgrade your system to 21st-century status. It’s about complementing, rather than replacing, your existing kit

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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, it has helped us fall in love again with those cumbersome old discs; being able to throw music from your palm to your speakers can be wonderful, but our desire to fall for an album’s cover and actually hold our music has far from been quelled.

That speaks for vinyl more than CD, of course, with the latter’s sales dropping dramatically over recent years. But that doesn’t have to make for wholly miserable reading: more likely it is the rise and ubiquity of CD-quality streaming, not to mention the ever-increasing range of hi-res options, that mean you don’t actually need the silver disc anymore for comparable sound. But how and why cassette tapes have risen again in popularity we’re still struggling to fathom.

So yes, you can have it all. That’s why this piece is titled ‘How to add a 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’.

There’s a short answer, of course, which would be to read some of our music streamer reviews around your budget, make a choice and plug in. But, as ever, there are more important things than money when it comes to getting the best sound and feature set for you.

What do we mean by a music streamer? Well, a streamer is any component that allows you to play music wirelessly – using a streaming-service app and/or network storage device – to your hi-fi system.