New streamer needed

ugh.  There are so many threads on this exact topic, just in the last month.  You should do a search on the topic.  

But, in a nutshell, there are two separate camps on this topic lurking here on this forum.  One argues that spending a significant amount of $ on a streamer can be a waste of your precious resources, because the science, measurements and their experience tells them that beyond a basic level, there’s no difference in sound.  The other camp argues that based on their experience, there are clear differences, and therefore recommend spending upwards of $10k in some situations in order to optimize one’s system. I'm squarely in the first camp. So here goes:

The only distinctions across streamers  has to do with levels of jitter and other sources of noise.  These are easily measurable.  If your DAC is good at rejecting noise, you can assemble your own streamer for as little as $150 and it will sound great (and which I’ve done as an experiment myself).  However, if you want something less kludgy than a Raspberry Pi, and you want a streamer that measures   - and in some situations may sound - even better than a Pi (and measures and sounds comparable to some of the extremely high $ streamers out there), then there are a bunch of well regarded products that cost between $400 and $1k.  They include the iFi Zen, the Volumio Rivo, Holo Red, Pro-Ject Stream Box S2 Ultra, the Primare Np5, and probably a bunch I’m forgetting.  I have both an iFi and a Pro-Ject.  

Btw, I’m a Roon fan, and also use Qobuz, which integrates seamlessly with Roon.  Happy to share more if you’re interested.  Good luck.

oh, btw, totally disagree with @ghdprentice regarding the long-term prospects of Roon (keeping in mind what I’ve already said, which is that I’m a fan).  Roon very powerfully integrates your cd collection, burned on a NAS and/or residing on a dedicated server, with whatever your streaming service is.  But the really brilliant differentiator for Roon is their software works with almost everybody else’s hardware.  This is particularly useful if you have multiple systems - you can mix and match and change your streamers and dacs to your heart’s delight.  Finally, the Harman acquisition secures Roon’s future, and hegemony, for a long time, IMHO. Most of their higher-cost competitors are small, specialty companies.  

The pro-ject is designed to facilitate the direct connection of an external drive to a usb input, and I think the iFi is as well.  not sure about the others I referenced, but you should check. Regarding the difference in sound you heard, there are two other reasons I could think of:

1) It could be that your DAC is not fully immune to jitter or other noise introduced to it from either your streamer or your cd transport.  If that were the case, you could hear a difference between the two. Btw, you never mentioned what model your old streamer was - that could be the culprit.

2) When you changed to cd, you listened intently for differences, and could simply be hearing what you were listening for.  That’s a classic opportunity for confirmation bias, something we’ve all experienced a time or two.  For a more in depth discussion of that, you could check out the thread “The Emperor Has No Clothes” (though full warning, you’ll have to wade thru a lot  of discussion of cars!).

Snd regarding synergy with your system, the folks in my camp generally believe that a streamer, properly implemented, does not have a sonic signature of its own.  That’s established in the analogue realm, which means somewhere between your DAC and your speakers.  Hope that helps.

I may be in over my head here, but I don’t understand how you were streaming previously.  If I’m not mistaken, the Accuphase is a CD player (i.e., both a transport and an internal DAC), but it doesn’t have streaming ability does it?  And based upon my advanced research skills (called “Google”), the Sony is an “optical block” associated with a CD transport.  Am I missing something obvious? How have you been streaming Qobuz with that setup?

@stievus 

I am totally lost here.  I was asking you what was the 10-year old streamer that you had that you said no longer works?  Are you saying that your Accuphase has streaming capability? Or were you using a server of some sort that fed your Accuphase?

@audphile1 

“Don’t you love it when you ask for advice and you get a response claiming that you’re pretty much delusional because what you hear, none of that is real, it’s all in your head. The details, transparency and depth is all confirmation bias. Or your dac is not entirely immune to jitter. Or it is both confirmation bias and your dac sucks.”

To quote a former U.S. president, “there you go again.” That’s just an ad hominem attack dressed up as a defense of the OP.  I really urge you to dial it back.   I stated very clearly up front in my first response to the OP exactly what my perspective is, and also made sure that he understood that there was an alternative perspective.  And unlike you, I characterized that alternative in a fair and even-handed way.
 

And with respect to your specific accusations, let me just give you one example of how hyperbolic your language is.  I have never, in this post or any other, claimed that a DAC that is not completely immune to jitter and other sources of noise sucks.  I have seen others make that argument, but I have never done so.  My own opinion, if you care to consider it, is that DAC designers make deliberate design choices based on sonics and economics.  

Now I’m no expert on the following point, so I would invite others to correct me if I’m wrong, but I can imagine that an NOS DAC, which is obviously not over sampling, is also less likely to reclock.  And I can imagine that building in significant noise filtering costs more $ at the margin (just like reclicking and over sampling).  So I can imagine a designer might make an advertent decision to concentrate their spending on other aspects that, assuming the DAC has a clean signal from a streamer, are more likely to have positive sonic benefits. That is also why I imagine that some companies offer both reclocking/oversampling devices and DACs separately, so the consumer can choose more precisely what he or she wants to spend his or her $ on.  And I can totally understand why someone would buy just such a DAC, because they like how it sounds!  And that’s awesome, and I bet I’d enjoy it too!

Finally, to @stievus , please be careful how you let anonymous posters manipulate your views in order to grind their own axes.

@stievus 

I swear, this is the last time I’m going to ask; I’m doing so because it might help me and others understand your situation and give you the feedback you’ve asked for.  What was or were the exact streamer(s) - brand(s) and model(s) - that broke down on you?  Am having a hard time understanding your reluctance to share that key data point.

@audphile1 

well I did obviously.  I would think you’d want to know something about what his prior experience is before you recommend such significant expenditures, but to each his own. and the use of the term “pathetic” is, again, ad hominem.

very helpful.  You’re right, I don’t know anything about your modded Sonos, but the base Sonoscis likened to 44.1 khz, right? Whereas you DAC can handle up to 192 khz, right?  So in theiry, at least on some music, that could explain a difference in sound.  Again, hope that helps.

limited, not “likened”

@stievus 

got it. I do have some experience with a Wired4Sound modded Sonos unit that I borrowed from a friend a few years ago.  It sounds like yours does something very similar to what the W4S unit did, except the latter upsampled with a limit of 96 khz (spdif output).

In my system, I didn’t hear a difference between that and a Sonos output to a Benchmark DAC1, but emphasis on “my system.”  One other question I would pose that is way beyond my technical expertise is whether there’s a difference between the sound of something that comes in at 44.1khz and is upsampled to either 96k or 192khz- vs something that can handle a native rate of 96 or 192.  These are questions best answered by someone other than me.

@stievus 

Sorry, I wasn’t clear.  The W4S modified Sonos bypassed the internal DAC just like yours.  So my comparison was of a stock sonos with digital out to benchmark, vs modified sonos out to benchmark.  The dac’s sound dominated, which is what Benchmark would predict.  

One other point of clarification.  It appears that your modified Sonos was upsampling to 192k, so your nos dac takes that and outputs 192k I assume.  But the Accuohase CD transport is 16 bit 44.1k limited, so if I understand your dac, it’s outputting 44.1k in that case.  So those two should sound very different, I think.

@stievus 

Sorry, I wasn’t clear.  The W4S modified Sonos bypassed the internal DAC just like yours.  So my comparison was of a stock sonos with digital out to benchmark, vs modified sonos out to benchmark.  The dac’s sound dominated, which is what Benchmark would predict.  

One other point of clarification.  It appears that your modified Sonos was upsampling to 192k, so your nos dac takes that and outputs 192k I assume.  But the Accuohase CD transport is 16 bit 44.1k limited, so if I understand your dac, it’s outputting 44.1k in that case.  So those two should sound very different, I think.

in other words, I don’t think you’re hearing the streamer, I think you’re hearing the upsampling, which you don’t like.  am guessing the cd transport sounds more natural to you, but just a guess.

The one thing that’s factual and clearly knowable is what exactly is happening to the digital data stream in your two use cases.  Without knowing that for sure, I believe it’s difficult to make a decision on what you want for a streamer, because your benchmark is not just the cd transport, it’s the delta (difference) between your old streamer and the transport.  That’s why I was so persistent in asking you what your old streamer was. I’m pretty sure my analysis is correct, so it’s up to you to figure out what to do with that knowledge.  

But if I am correct, and your aural memory is accurate as to your preferences (always a challenge for me), then my advice would be to get a streamer that does 0 processing to the native data stream.  That doesn’t mean you’re limited to 44.1k, it just means you would be hearing the music in the format that it was mastered to be played in, thru the DAC that you like. (This goes back to what @benanders may have been trying to get at a while ago, btw.)

As I said originally, I don’t think you need to spend $5k or anything close to that to get what you want.  And I think that some of the high cost streamers may do alot of processing to the signal which may be the exact opposite of what you want.  

Final point, I promise.  To me, the Sonos example underscores the point I’ve been trying to make on this and several other threads.  We all knew the Sonos DAC was mediocre at best back in the day, so every self-respecting audiophile  who just started streaming with Sonos got themselves an external DAC.  And then some folks pointed out that even as a transport, the Sonos was deeply flawed cuz it had tons of jitter.  So a cottage industry arose of companies performing mods on the Sonos to address the known flaws. In certain cases, with some DACs, such mods were unnecessary and made no difference.  In my view, this fundamental dynamic as it relates to current streamers is unchanged, almost 20 years later.  

Good luck, and enjoy the journey.

I have a high speed 3 unit mesh system, 1 unit for each floor.  I have 3 different streamers on wifi, one for each floor.  None are wired to a mesh unit, in other word 100% wifi, and they all receive high res files without issue.  I was prepared to get an additional mesh unit to site it right next to streamer and connect with cable if necessary, but was not needed. 

btw, my home network is completely thru the mesh.  In other words, router to base mesh unit. then switch to same mesh unit. then everything else on network plugs to switch (e.g., small green computer which is my server, ethernet connection for my one wired streamer, etc.).

Few observations:

- Do a wifi speed test near your router, and then where your streamer will be to determine whether you need anything to enhance speed (i.e., to get an idea of how much speed you lose with distance).

- A dongle is just a design feature; a Raspberry Pi has wifi capability without the need for a dongle.  The three wifi streamers i currently use all have dongles.  It’s just how they implement wifi.

- If you need something to enhance speed, I don’t see any reason why your original thought - TP Link with extender - wouldn’t work.  I use the mesh system network rather that my router’s network because I have 3 floors and my router is in the basement.  

Hope that helps.

oh, one more thought, to emphasize.  You don’t need to spend alot for wifi streamers.  Am pretty sure that all 5 of the units unde $1k I mentioned do wifi.  Finally, I highly recommend you keep the server separate from the streamer. just as you’re keeping the dac separate from the streamer.  

63mbps is not great, but is more than enough for high res music if it doesn’t fluctuate much (video is much more demanding).  For comparison, I’m getting over 375 in our mbr right now, and that’s probably the slowest of any room in the house.  But it’s all about the fluctuations; if you get a rock solid over 50, you shouldn’t have dropouts.

144 is plenty.  And the Volumio seems like a great choice - I really love the look!

based on quick look at their website, doesn’t look like Metronome does wifi, so you should make sure.  But also much more limited regarding high res sample rates, both pcm and dsd; only 192k and dsd64,vs 768k dsd256 for Volumio.

 well, you know where I stand on high priced gear…

@stievus 

“on the bright side”!?  Please explain to me how a streamer contributes to tone.  That’s just silly talk.

lol! definitely old enuf to remember that.  just remember though, assuming no processing of the digital stream (e.g., oversampling, dsp), all a streamer does is move a digital data stream between a server and your dac.  In that case, the only thing that distinguishes one streamer from another is how they manage/minimize noise.  “Tone” is established in the analogue realm, which means your DAC and downstream from there (amp and speakers). If that were not the case, you would see streamers marketed with tubes.  Even the companies that market streamers that, in my view, are way overpriced don’t do that, which is a tacit acknowledgement of the silliness.  To channel another classic Python scene, talking about the airspeed of an unladen swallow makes more sense than discussing a streamer’s “tone”.