@deep_333 +1.
This was the central point behind my earlier message, but it was not described as succinctly as you.
I have spoken to 2 individuals who tried moderately expensive name-brand streamers to replace a music and TV room set of operation similar to what I have. Both told me that if there was any difference in sound quality it was too small for the expense and loss of all the convenience with my current operation.
@firstonetallguy .. Many of these guys may not know how to build a audio optimized PC or have knowledge of computing hardware/software. I think that’s where some of these false belief systems arise.
This is all it takes....
- A high quality, very low ripple, etc PC power supply (seasonic platinum, ~200 bucks) or other...
- small ITX board (without any overclocking frills, ~150 bucks)
- some higher core Ryzen APU, ~200 bucks (i.e. no discrete noisy graphics card involved)
- Put it all in a HTPC case like these ones made by Silverstone (~100 bucks) and it will like a stereo amplifier sitting on your rack, have the same form factor.
You can undervolt these things so it barely sips any power or generates any spurious noise...or not..doesn’t really matter that much. Use ASIO or Wasapi with your player (like foobar2000) so you lock out any interference from the rest of the OS.....and you’re good to go.............But, when one doesn’t know, he’ll shell out 20k to some vulture for a 1-trick pony that doesn’t sound any better. I can open some of these vulture priced streamers and show you the same 150 dollar itx board tucked away inside. The chassis will be fancy though, to apparent audiophile standards, i.e., justify a pricetag of 20k.
Or....if one’s a PC hardware noob, forget the PC hardware research and custom PC build....Just get a Beelink pre-built mini pc (~300 bucks) fresh off Amazon with a Ryzen 5800H, about the size of your palm) and power it with a high quality linear power supply. Despite its diminutive size, It’s a full blown computer and you can even play some less demanding games on it, not to mention everything else in life you wanna do with your wireless keyboard+mouse sitting on your couch. Since USB doesn’t rely on the streamer or PC’s clock (like toslink, coax, etc), everything just depends on how good a external dac you may have...and how good the DAC's ASIO driver is, who wrote it. It is important to use ASIO or WASAPI with your PC’s player however.
I’ll eat my hat if someone got much better sound out of his 20k streamer or 40k streamer when plugged into the same dac, whatever dac that might be.
