USB Cable

OP, a system like yours deserves a high quality streamer like Aurender N20 or Innuos Pulsar (if you prefer ROON). I just concluded a head to head comparison between N30SA and W20SE and chose to go with N30SA over W20SE. I used to own N20 and IMHO, N20 holds the sweet spot in Aurender line up. For half the price of N30SA or W20SE, it’s capable of ringing 85%-90% performance of the aforementioned top tier models.

You gotta love our forum…you must be scratching your head. How the hell this discussion morphed into  $100-$200 USB cable recommendations to spending $12K to $25K streamers….lol!

@soix

No further affirmations needed! There are several folks here, who took the initiative to audition a high quality streamer over PC; heard the obvious improvements and couldn’t go back to PC as their prime source for streaming.

The 1’s and 0’s and bits are bits believers won’t understand the value proposition of a well designed streamer. Just leave them be.

“I am curious how many of these people used a fibre optic cable for the final feet just before the DAC.”

@yyzsantabarbara 

I honestly do not know, you can start a new thread and conduct a poll. Million dollar or inexpensive music streamer/server…they all have a processor at heart. The premise here is, a general purpose PC is not optimized or optimal for audio streaming. You can add fiber or filters as alluded by @antigrunge2 ahead of a DAC to reduce noise but a general purpose PC will never sound as good as dedicated streamer designed specifically to stream audio. Fortunately, there are plenty of decent choices out there at all price points.