I have been in this hobby a while. After graduating college in 1980 and replacing my Kenwood receiver and refurbished speakers with a Kenwood integrated amp, Scott Speakers and a Kenwood DD TT, I felt I had a pretty nice stereo system. That was it until 1988. Then I moved up to planar speakers and started my journey into "hifi". I delved into modifications and tweaks for the next 15 years and slowly worked myself into the "high end hifi" or what I called the big boys club. Once into the high dollar equipment, I can say that while mods and tweaks of gear is a fun side to this hobby, the high dollar stuff has the goods when it comes to great sound. I spent the first few months of my recent retirement revamping my stereo system and adding hi res music playback capability which is something that I have wanted to do since about 2011. I have stuck to vinyl playback all of these years and my vinyl rig has never sounded better with my latest turntable, preamp, phono cartridge and phono cable. My CD playback today is outstanding and blows away all of my beliefs about the limitations of Redbook CDs.
I am not surprised at all about the current debate and merits of high dollar digital streaming equipment and cables. I watched a video last night about USB cables. I was amused by this guy with some expensive electronic measurement equipment arguing that all USB cables are equal. He showed with his measurements that the only difference in USB cable performance is the length. He showed shorter is better. Well, a lot of people already knew that by listening. His high dollar measurement equipment wasn't needed to tell us that but it is good to know.
All of this debate about digital streaming reminds me of the same debate that raged in the 1980's about speaker cables. It's just wire. "If the resistance is low enough then there is no difference," so said the naysayers. Once people figured out how to measure and what to measure, specialized speaker wire became accepted. Same with interconnects and power cables. I believe that as the digital streaming technology matures we will see what matters and what does not. To me, the state of digital streaming today is extremely complicated and confusing. I spent months reading and studying to try and wrap my head around it all. I have a Marantz Home Theater Receiver that can stream music- sound is ok. So why does hi end hi res streaming have to be so complicated?
I jumped into music streaming first with a "low cost" solution. That did not work well at all but I had to try because I was a working man and I'm not going to spend my money without getting perceived value in return. And before I took the "low cost streamer path" of course I tried streaming into my DAC with my laptop computer.
Keep in mind that a stereo system is a chain. Each link in the chain is important. A good amp paired to poor speakers is not going to shine at its best. A good turntable paired to a weak preamp cannot sound its best. Therefore, an average streamer feeding into a high quality DAC and stereo playback system will sound pretty good but it's limitations will be apparent. That is what I found. With a high quality streamer, I find MQA file playback breathtaking. Hi res files are close behind followed by CD quality. Streaming hi res is outstanding but CD quality streaming is still just a tiny bit less than CD file playback on my system. These differences were not so apparent to me when streaming through my laptop.
I am not surprised at all about the current debate and merits of high dollar digital streaming equipment and cables. I watched a video last night about USB cables. I was amused by this guy with some expensive electronic measurement equipment arguing that all USB cables are equal. He showed with his measurements that the only difference in USB cable performance is the length. He showed shorter is better. Well, a lot of people already knew that by listening. His high dollar measurement equipment wasn't needed to tell us that but it is good to know.
All of this debate about digital streaming reminds me of the same debate that raged in the 1980's about speaker cables. It's just wire. "If the resistance is low enough then there is no difference," so said the naysayers. Once people figured out how to measure and what to measure, specialized speaker wire became accepted. Same with interconnects and power cables. I believe that as the digital streaming technology matures we will see what matters and what does not. To me, the state of digital streaming today is extremely complicated and confusing. I spent months reading and studying to try and wrap my head around it all. I have a Marantz Home Theater Receiver that can stream music- sound is ok. So why does hi end hi res streaming have to be so complicated?
I jumped into music streaming first with a "low cost" solution. That did not work well at all but I had to try because I was a working man and I'm not going to spend my money without getting perceived value in return. And before I took the "low cost streamer path" of course I tried streaming into my DAC with my laptop computer.
Keep in mind that a stereo system is a chain. Each link in the chain is important. A good amp paired to poor speakers is not going to shine at its best. A good turntable paired to a weak preamp cannot sound its best. Therefore, an average streamer feeding into a high quality DAC and stereo playback system will sound pretty good but it's limitations will be apparent. That is what I found. With a high quality streamer, I find MQA file playback breathtaking. Hi res files are close behind followed by CD quality. Streaming hi res is outstanding but CD quality streaming is still just a tiny bit less than CD file playback on my system. These differences were not so apparent to me when streaming through my laptop.