Wildcat

I ran into Scoggins at AXPONA, on an elevator--he is a first-class name dropper (he threw out John Atkinson's name in his typical loud and boorish fashion) and brown-noser, doing so to ingratiate himself with the industry. He also used to claim he was bestest buddies with David Chesky, just to give a point of reference. Of course he's gung-ho on MQA! He gets reamed elsewhere for "whoring" MQA with his one-sided opinions. He's one of these fellows with a successful business and too much disposable income--he's above the "typical" consumer out there, hence the condescending attitude which is hinted at above. And kudos to Chris for standing up to the MQA contingent. The more cracks in MQA's foundation, the better. :)

I'm using a Chromecast (video) in my main system, via the HDMI input on the rear of my Oppo BDP-105. Since that player already has its own Tidal app, I have little need to stream Tidal from my tablet or phone to the Chromecast. But, it is nice to have as an option. Do I expect optimal results? No. But I'm using the Chromecast strictly for convenience. I can change inputs on the Oppo without having to turn on the TV (I use the player almost exclusively for audio playback), and can then stream background music from the handful of streaming apps on my tablet (Pandora, TuneIn Radio, Tidal) with minimal fuss. I may still spring for a Chromecast Audio for other systems in the house, and even the Oppo (if I ever needed that HDMI input for something else). And again, sound quality isn't the priority in that mode. Even gapless I can live without--it's only a very small subset of what I listen to. That's where I feel that article went overboard with critiquing this $35 device. 99% of people who buy this don't care about sound quality or gapless--it's a mass market item.

The sacd_extract.exe (and Sonore) will also extract to DSF, 2-channel or multichannel. I don't bother with Sonore since it uses Java (which I'd prefer not be on my computers). I use the command line version. Fast and tidy.

Six down, dozens more to go. Just wanted to hop on here and say that it's working fine on an Oppo BDP-105. Getting about 2.5MB/sec over Ethernet. I'm a bit wary of upgrading to the latest Oppo firmware but from reading here, it seems it should be OK to do so. This beats the hassle of finding, modifying and using a PS3. IMHO, anyway. I use my Oppo as a network player, and it seems that the DSF files I extracted play just fine over the network when using the Oppo Media Control app on phone or tablet. (I thought I had read that DSD files would only play from a tethered USB drive, but it appears to be working OK over the network for me.)