BS meter is pegged!

I was a network guy for a short time putting in a token ring/ethernet/appletalk networks 35 years ago and I haven’t heard any big changes in sq when getting these so called audiophile switches. If I want the quietest node, I’d use fiber. 
I also think usb sounds bad even when you apply thousands of dollars of tweaks, but I do hear differences in cables.

These are the same people who claim expensive cables sound different and better than coat hangers. They don't. Snake oil marketing, and people buy it. Willful ignorance. 

All of these exotic streamers are just mini PCs running Linux and somebodyʻs custom front end.   P.T. Barnum was right.

Squared80-I hear differences in cables, whether they are cheap crappy cables to the most expensive. Most cable naysayers have never heard the more expensive cables themselves but they find it easier to jump on the naysayer bandwagon, for example the audiophools website ANA. Since I have demoed the Valhalla’s down to the down to earth $1000 cables in my system, and have been with other audiophiles demoing cables, if you have a resolving system and a decent set of ears, you will hear differences. I never think that the most expensive cables themselves sound the best or they are worth the cost over a different cable, but I as well as my audiophile friends do hear differences in cables. 
In the past I brought in a $100 cable that a bunch of cable naysayers claimed is a giant killer. After several weeks of burn-in, this cable was POS and was sent back. Maybe this cable sounded better than the free in the box cables you get when you buy a piece, but compared to my $1000 cable, it was a piece of sh$t.

It's called "selling the sizzle."  In this day and age, lesser known manufacturers must find something that on paper distinguishes their generic server from the rest of the generic servers.  So they come up with techno-nonsense that usually can't be proven or disproven.  What is a "CPU that is highly prioritized for audio?"  Probably the same CPU as always with maybe a BIOS tweak.  My favorite example is the Shunmook record clamp, made from magical ebony soaked in the mysterious swamps of Africa that is supposed to have magical properties when paying your vinyl. Uh-huh.  It's a record clamp.  It's made of ebony.  Cost of Manufacture:  let's be generous . . . $200.  Retail: $4000.00+. So how does a manufacturer convince someone to pay that kind of money for an ebony record clamp? It's not just "ebony" like the poor folk can get.  It's the magical African swamp ebony.  There is the nonsensical "sizzle."  What about MIT's "poles of articulation"?  The more poles of articulation, the more expensive the cables.  More BS, even though MIT cables are typically good cables.  Time to think critically about the sizzle.  Maybe this server does sound better.  But it is surely not because of the marketing sizzle fed to us by reviewers who are willing to pass it along.

I’d just say this is a thread to make fun of a reviewer who should have never pretended to understand something he/she didn’t, much less to try to spit it back to sound intelligent. Secondarily, yes, I am sure there is more than a little puffery in what the mfr. said in the first place.

Technical knowledge in reviewers has improved, but there will always be those that try to use some strained form of analog logic with computers and digital. You see it constantly.

Do you all remember that infamous 4-part special in The Absolute Sound about digital? This was maybe 2010? It had so much BS I couldn’t possibly remember it all...but one that I still remember vividly is when the test team - that included a PhD -- copied files from one hard drive to the next and back and cataloged how the different generations of copies degraded sound.

Amazing tape deck logic applied to hard drives. This was actually published. Once you see that, you have to question everything they publish. 

During a rmaf or some other audio show, I was talking to a manufacturer that claimed the only hard drives that sounded good was the xxxx xxxxx model over others 1’s he mentioned. With my friends with me, I asked him point blank that this drive sounded better than this other drive, and he said yes. I told him that’s funny because I work for the largest hdd/ssd manufacturer in the world and we make that drive you are recommending but this other drive that you say doesn’t sound as good, it’s the same drive as the other drive just rebranded by the company. I then pointed out that a couple other drives he thought sounded bad were actually the same just rebranded. We had a good laugh at the manufacturers ignorance. 
There are just a few high tech companies that make hdd/ssd in the world, the others are just rebranded. If you are in high tech, people are aware of this, in the audio world, probably don’t know this.

You Tube Rockwell Retro Encabulator

It's funny how nobody is calling or Emailing the manufacturer with these questions in this thread.

Somebody else posted this earlier and I agree with them, the reviewer should be the person to call the manufacturer and iron out any discrepancies and let the subscribers (and us) know if what was stated in the article is exactly what the manufacturer stated or the reviewer misrepresented some of the claims. It’s normally the person or the company of the reviewer/journalist to fix if anything is wrong. In the past I’ve seen manufacturers respond to agon threads like this as well as Fremer and others in the past. Maybe somebody can ask the magazine to look into these items.

I had no idea there were so many customers for a $18k streamer solution. 

Obviously, my bad.

Let's not contact the manufacturer with any questions, let's big IT dick battle over stripped down OS's and argue amongst ourselves. 

This place kind of sucks.

Some manufacturers respond promptly on ASR. Not so much around here. Squeaky wheel gets the grease I guess

Actually very few manufacturers respond on ASR. Yang from Topping used to until Amir did his work for him.
Why would a manufacturer respond on a site where the members take pleasure in criticising your products?

@p05129 

As a technologist myself, I agree that the Stereophile review does seem like something that needs to get scraped off our shoes before going into the house.  I agree with every one of your points.  It's just NOT the way computers work at all.  Even simple DACs can't read data directly off the external source, it must be read into a buffer and then into memory before it can be processed.  And the tasks of preparing the data for processing requires parallel tasks.

Computer processor loads for actual digital to analog processing are rather light compared to all the parallel tasks associated with acquiring and preparing the data for the conversion. 

@laoman 

That’s a good question. Sometimes it’s better to get in front of things than ignore them. Sometimes.

There are more, but I’m only familiar with 2 manufacturers responding on ASR: the dude from tekton, and the vastly more illustrious Bob Carver.

The tekton guy wasted an excellent opportunity to keep his mouth shut and stay out of it. But Bob Carver, ironically because his amp’s problems were far more egregious than the tekton speaker’s, did a much better job handling the crowds, surfing the wave instead of ordering it to back off.

@invalid @coralkong 

Have questions been asked?

in this new era, if you say some BS many times, without ever backing down, like Haitians eating your pets, or gazillion gallons of waters wanting to gush down from Canada, rejected by Californian lefties, people will believe you. A new age of marketing...  

🎼My Dogs better than your dog.  My dogs better than yours.  My dogs better cause he eats Kennel Ration, my dogs better than yours.🎶

People are asking if these concerns have been asked to the reviewer or to the manufacturer. I remember seeing in the past that reviewers send the manufacturers the review before posting it, and Stereophile does so the manufacturer can make a comment about the review in the same issue. Read this:

https://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/307awsi#:~:text=The%20manufacturer%20is%20not%20made,same%20issue%20as%20the%20review.

The manufacturer did not make a comment. Huh!

@p05129 this thread reminds me of some threads about how Alberto from AGD couldn't possibly have GaNFETs designed specifically for audio. How would they possibly know the truth one way or another.

I'm no expert but...considering that many on this forum will recommend listening to digital sources via a dedicated DAC & Streamer vs. an off-the-shelf laptop because the dedicated audio units are designed to minimize signal processing steps and interference pathways. While you can call BS on whether or not they actually have "enhanced memory" chips and single-step CPUs, I imagine what they're trying to market is that the hardware & OS have been optimized to eliminate signal and processing interference by eliminating extraneous processing requirements for the hardware components. If you're Streaming / DAC box only processes digital information and sends that same data packet out (vs. a laptop or desktop that has to run the bloated OS processes on top of whatever software processes the box is running) then it would stand to reason the components have been "enhanced" by eliminating the extraneous OS/Software and hardware burdens. 

Does that mean they've designed and fab'd their own CPUs and RAMs to achieve this? Pretty sure the answer is no. It's great marketing though! Imagine trying to convince people that instead of using their laptop, the component manufacturer said it manufactured a stripped-down computer box for you to stream from and used off-the-shelf components they bought off NewEgg.com without designing it for hi-fi use would you buy it? 

We all know Hi-fi manufacturers have to justify the new improvements even though most of that is just ad copy jargon written to make minor circuit design improvements sound better than just saying, we swapped parts. 

But then again, maybe these guys did find a fab center that would do custom chips and flash memory runs for them.

Bipod72- what are bloated processes? What do you call eliminating extraneous processing that the OS does? I’m not talking about windows because that OS is junk running on old technology hardware. I’m talking about Linux which most streamers/servers use. Like somebody stated earlier on, Linux and Unix do run processes to keep the OS running efficiently with read ahead buffers, moving data into different caches, freeing up memory, on and on. You do not want to eliminate any of these processes.
So let me ask the manufacturer or any audiophile that thinks eliminating a few process is a good thing: if a developer modifies the Linux kernel and eliminated 100 processes, what part of the sound quality will be enhanced/different? The current CPU’s can perform many trillions of operations per second, so what will be the benefit from eliminating a few running processes? Better imaging? Soundstage? Separation between instruments?

@rbstehno 

+100. 

Has anybody seen any update/feedback in the recent Stereophile issues from the manufacturer or from the reviewer? It's odd that the manufacturer hasn't posted a comment

@p05129

"a cpu that’s highly prioritized for audio playback only ensuring highly optimized sound quality".

When I saw this quote, I stopped reading your thread post. Your BS meter is good.

Put fibre optical cable just before the DAC, like the digital savant, Andreas Koch from PlayBack Designs, and the questions about the streaming source (CPU et al) go away.

How much can a streamer (let alone a $20,000 one) improve a signal coming from a $150 Modem/Router provided by an internet provider?

Yyz-that’s old technology, some of us have talked about this for almost a decade. The converters might be better today compared to what they were many years ago. 
But, comparing fiber to the dac and the article that the OP wrote about are 2 different things.