Yes, you can do it. I have streamed from about every device you can think of. Honestly, in general, they sound pretty good… especially with a good DAC, until you start comparing with purpose built streamers.
Old phones as streaming sources
I'm curious how many of you have converted old phones to streamers. I have found that when I remove the sim card and shut off blue tooth and wire the phone to a dac with an appropriate USB adapter cable, my old iphone 6s makes a pretty good streamer. Just wondering what others experiance has been. It is a really economical way to source digital to a 2nd or 3rd system. You can even cut electronic noise further by running on battery power when listening and shutting off the screen once the music is rolling. Going one step further would be to transfer local files to the phones memory and turn off wireless altogether. I have not done this but theoretically it should help. I usually just run the Qobuz app and stream from that to my Chord Mojo. What's your experiance?
Showing 4 responses by ghdprentice
From an earlier in this post, I said …” I have streamed from about every device you can think of.” Let me go into a bit more detail. I have owned / used extensively in my systems: iPods, iPhones, iPads, several MACs, PCs (some optimized by shutting down processes, heavily conditioned power source, using different CODEX and software, sound cards, etc), several DAPs (including my $3.5K one), And many dedicated streamers including, Aurlic Aries G2, Aurrender N100, N10, N20, and my current W20SE ($22K), Linn, Grimm MU1, Lina… and I am sure I sure I have forgotten a few. The streamer is a critical component in sound quality of a digital system… and iPhones, iPads, Macs and the like sound pretty good, but are simply not in the same league as dedicated streamers. The gap is big at the low end and simply gets bigger and bigger as one moves up the quality level of the streamers / systems.
I have found that Aurender are at the top of the class at every level of expenditure and each level up affords a substantial improvement in sound quality over the last. I climbed slowly to this level, where my system is today, over a period of twenty years. My current digital end being equal in sound quality to my really good analog end. A friend of mine mentioned that Aurender said somewhere in their literature that the streamer accounts for 70% of the sound quality of a system vs 30% DAC. While this kind of thing is not analytical… but intended to convey the importance. The problem is, you can’t use a low end DAC and a high end streamer, this is the first thing someone will counter with. But if you are talking high end components in roughly the same class… so say a Berkely Alpha 3 DAC and a Aurrender N20… the component that is vastly controlling the sound quality is the streamer.
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@eagledriver_22 …”This leads to my conclusion that every one who is interested in this topic needs to find out for himself where the truth lies. ” Yes, very true. For me, I have been really amazed at how much the streamer makes a difference. But of course an inferior DAC will compromise the sound as well. The moral of the story is that everything matters. |