A/B Comparison On A Pair Of Moderately Priced Streamers

Let me rephrase ... I know that not to be the case. A 'high end' streamer still streams the same digital data to my DAC as my tablet or PC or Bluesound Node does. If I suffered from noise, I'd invest a little in an optical cable, or a galvanic separated USB dongle.

"... my experience is upgrading a streamer is at least as impactful as upgrading a DAC."

So ... what you’re saying is that, given the same (uncompressed) source file, different streamers send different bits and bytes to the DAC? I can’t believe that to be the case.

One might be able to hear the dfference between compression rates, but even that is hard ... find out if you have a 100% score below.

@soix Let me first say there’s no need for us to quarrel. If someone hears an improvement after upgrading to a more expensive streamer, then that’s great.

I doubt though that such improvement has anything to do with the digital data. Playing from disk, or USB drive, or NAS, the data that reaches the DAC is exactly the same, no matter what streamer is in between. If it isn’t, there would be cracks and pops or hiccups. 

And if the data is streamed over the internet, coming from the other side of the globe, it already passed countless hubs, switches, servers, repeaters, amplifiers, routers and what have you, before it reached our home … still it is the same data.

Streamers can’t generate an ’improved soundstage’ or ’deeper bass’ if that information is not already encoded in the digital stream in the first place. For the same reason I also don’t believe in ’audiophile’ ethernet- or USB cables … it really is exactly the same data that comes out. We can both read this text without the characters being messed up, the bytes all reached our screen perfectly well, with Megabyte or even Gigabyte speed.

FYI I use a Bluesound Node Mk2 with my main system. A dedicated fanless PC with my second system. And a ’high end’ (not audiophile high end, but digital high end) PC for synth and DAW music production, with two powered studio monitors. Besides the BS Node I use two DACs. With the powered monitors I suffered from digital noise, which was eliminated by using a galvanic separation between PC USB out to DAC.

@ghdprentice Thank you for an as reasonable written contribution.

@soix  I'm happy with my Node.

Maybe this is a good read: Denon USB DAC whitepaper.

If one follows these guidelines, digital audio will reach the USB DAC ’bit-perfect’, as Denon calls it. It can’t get any more perfect than that can it?

You're welcome moonwatcher and thanks for taking the effort to reply.