In my experience the streamer impacts the sound. I added a Meridian Sooloos Ms600 to my system to allow streaming through my Simaudio Moon 650D CD. I was running Roon off my laptop in another room by my router. Network connections were Cat6 Ethernet cable and Ethernet over powerline adapters. I had music files on a USB hard drive hooked up to my laptop. Tidal aside for the moment, I could never get songs streamed from my hard drive via the MS600 to my Moon 650d to sound as good as CD played directly on the 650D. As an experiment, I tried using Simaudio’s own streamer instead of the Meridian MS600 and, what do you know, streaming files from my computer now sounded the same as CDs! Turns out, the Meridian MS600 imposes it’s own sonic signature on the sound and it was not as much to my liking. The Moon streamer has the same Simaudio house sound that I liked and was pretty much indistinguishable from the transport in the 650D. So, streamers impact the sound.
i also found that the digital coax cable I used between the streamer and the DAC influenced the sound, though not as much as the streamer itself. In this way it was like switching out any other cable in my system.
I have now dropped CD entirely and just use. Simaudio Moon 780D V2 streamer/DAC. Yet even with this expensive component, WAV files streamed locally from my hard drive sound a bit better than the same 16/44.1 FLAC file off of Tidal. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe Tidal FLAC files are compressed and suffer slightly in the uncompressing process? Maybe streaming inserts a little noise into the system? I’d love others’ opinions!
i also found that the digital coax cable I used between the streamer and the DAC influenced the sound, though not as much as the streamer itself. In this way it was like switching out any other cable in my system.
I have now dropped CD entirely and just use. Simaudio Moon 780D V2 streamer/DAC. Yet even with this expensive component, WAV files streamed locally from my hard drive sound a bit better than the same 16/44.1 FLAC file off of Tidal. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe Tidal FLAC files are compressed and suffer slightly in the uncompressing process? Maybe streaming inserts a little noise into the system? I’d love others’ opinions!