Point of higher priced streamer?

@ironlung, you are fighting an uphill battle trying to reason with audio2design and his ilk, but full marks for effort.

@vhiner, good post and I fully agree

I'd like to share my experience with different streamers and it's just my personal experience.  I think everything starts with the source of the signal.  If the signal quality of the music that you're streaming is more than the streamer or DAC can process than it's unlikely you'll experience the differences.  I went through the following set up and I'll rank them in ascending order in term of audible quality personally.  
1. Pendora => Oppo => PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC (via coax) 
2. Tidal hifi =>  Oppo => PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC (via coax)
3. Tidal hifi => PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC (via bridge)
4. CD =>  Oppo => PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC (via coax)
5. Tidal Master =>  Oppo => PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC (via coax)
6. CD => PS DSD Transport => PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC (via coax)
7.  Tidal Master => PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC (via bridge)
8. CD => PS DSD Transport => PS Audio DSD DAC (via coax)
9. Tidal Master => PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC (via bridge)

My elementary understanding from reading is that the entire chain of signal from your source of music to the speakers needs to be as lossless as possible.  The sampling rate  (khz) and the signal package size (bits) needs to be delivered to the DAC as clean and without any truncation as much as possible.  For example, some of the songs from TIDAL master is up to 24bits but if my DAC can only process 16bit then theoretically, there's some resolution loss along the path.  Same with streamer, if the package arrived to the streamer via the internet at 32 bits package and the streamer can only process 16bits.  This is where up-sampling comes to place to extract as much information as possible in some DACs.  This is also why CD signals at 16 bits are the best that you can extract from any transport and why SACD or DSD are capable of more details and quality.  If you are feeding a top of the line DAC that is capable processing 32 bit of information like the Lumin X1 streamer with source from 16 bits music or even lower, you're limited by the neither the DAC or streamer but the source.  On the other hand, if you're streaming DSD content to a streamer that is capable of only 16 bits processing or your DAC can only process 16 bit signal then that's the best you're probably get.  The rule of garbage in = garbage out is applicable in every step of the food chain from the source => streamer => DAC => Pre-amp => Amp => Speaker.

I made a typo in the following:
9.  Tidal Master => PS Audio DSD DAC (via bridge)

lemonhaze94 posts12-27-2020 9:40am@ironlung, you are fighting an uphill battle trying to reason with audio2design and his ilk, but full marks for effort.

You mean knowledgeable and not susceptible to flowery but technically in context meaningless words.

Audio2Design

John Darko wise? ..... Okay. Embarrassing? Yes. Technically illiterate? Yes. Prone to delusion? Probably. Makes things up? Definitely._———

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Wow. Ego-boner meter is off charts.

Please point me to your own site, or blog. I will be glad to visit. Although I am pretty sure it does not exist, other than from the bots at the Troll Factory in St.Petersburg