Bluesound Vault 2i, Cocktail Audio X40 or ??????????

Thanks. Nice test procedure. No arguing there :-)

You can stream Pandora through bluetooth to the Vault or Node. My advice is buy the Vault and rip the CDs directly.

The Node 2i and Node 2 are akin to the Swiss Army knife of the audio world. Lots of choices for audio streamers, dacs, servers devices but not too many that do as many varied tasks, with as much versatility as the Nodes. With the Vault it’s like a Swiss Army Deluxe because you add the ripping of your CD collection and proper tagging and metadata. Heck one could even spend an entire year by going to the local library and borrowing CDs to rip! You might have a huge library over time. What I like even more about Bluesound is the commitment to customer service, which I have used many times and the guys are awesome and the budget prices, since both of these devices are under $1200. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

Thank you all for invaluable input. Btw, I use a similar testing procedure as djones51. In my case it's the girlfriend who has fabulous ears but could care less about what's behind the sound. Her input is amazing.

For me it's my son with the golden ears. Wife's only interested when I put on some Mercury, Bowie or Boccelli.
Always tries to a/b test streamers, dacs, amps and speakers. So far my ears only recognized real differences with speakers.....Favourite amp at the moment is the Paradigm pw amp with inbuilt arc2 room correction because the RC makes wonders with my desk top SQ.