Analog vs. digital

Highest resolving and natural systems I've heard were multiples of $100k, practically that much on vinyl setup alone. Those systems and my aural memory of them has long been the reference for my home systems. IME not extremely difficult to get pretty high levels of resolution, transparency from digital, the issue is attaining the same level of natural timbre, timing, spaciousness that I've heard with the very best vinyl. At the level of vinyl I'm speaking of you're getting every bit and more of the resolution and transparency of digital, but you also get a certain feeling of relaxing into the music along with the extreme resolution/transparency. While digital is closing rapidly on this front, I still think some work needs to be done.

Another issue with determining a general sense of digital's potential is how highly variable streaming setups can be.  Streaming noise floors and systematic induced jitter may hinder dac potentials. I fully expect with further innovations in streaming hardware and software, digital will continue to close the gap on the finest vinyl setups.

As for my own vinyl setup, I fullly expect I'll never reach the level of vinyl reproduction I'm talking about here, digital is the future for me.

Close minded people have no chance to learn since they refuse to allow an experience that could cause them to reevaluate.

@overthemoon  Perhaps fairly easy to build a digital setup if playing cd's, Streaming may not be an easy plug and play endeavor, all you have to do is follow some of these streaming threads to see how complex this can be. I've long had vinyl setups, I agree they can be rather complex, still pales in comparison to streaming. Innovations and new ideas coming fast and furious. Just today I had conversation in regard to diy clone build of extreme high end music server, this being Taiko Extreme server, the complexity is just amazing. And to think the music server is only one component of many that go into streaming, the whole thing is sort of like researching and writing a dissertation! Now that I think of it, sure would be nice to see  dissertations on this very subject. Checking out the white papers on one single aspect of streaming can be quite complex and involving, virtual dissertations in themselves. Discussions of latency and non volatile RAM are just two small aspects which are extremely complex in themselves.

So the Taiko Extremes, Wadax, Pink Faun, Innuos Statements, Antipodes are waste of money. You think you know more about  technical aspects of streaming hardware than the experts. I guess that makes you a cut above the experts, lets see your white papers so we can observe your expertise.

I'm sure you've heard all the highest end streaming equipment, so you have both the technical expertise and the golden ear. Oh, forgot, you don't trust your sensory perceptions, no need to listen.

By the way, we're building our servers based on this research, so I'm not contributing to the audio 'charlatans' you claim them to be. These experiments will gain us empirical knowledge, but we know you consider that invalid since our sensory perceptions are far too faulty. Ones and Zeros, all very simple, hilarious.

Funny how objectivists believe they win every argument, never provide refutation of every point of contention, simply revert to measurements and argument sensory perception can't be trusted, don't need PHD for this simplistic conclusion.

Done with the discussion of measurements vs sensory perception.

Neither of us build commercially, I'm a curious diy, have been long building my own general purpose computers, thought I'd give music server computer a try. Bang for the buck is off the charts with diy music servers, commercial servers all use off the shelf motherboards with optimized OS, really not much more than that to most of them. They don't render well, lucky if they have nice power supply. My present server is combo off the shelf/diy, I don't waste effort on rendering with it, so impact on sound quality much less than the servers doing rendering, the thing is vast majority of off the shelf servers pay no attention to rendering, yet they charge like they're doing mass amounts of R&D. These guys likely have the greatest profit margins in audio, along with the cable guys. So, you and I may have something in common when it comes to marketing hype. Difference is I don't observe market hype with at least some of the white papers I've read, in these cases the particular person writing the paper doesn't have a product to sell using the technical knowledge they're expanding on.