We Need To Talk About Ones And Zeroes

@nonoise & ​​@mapman .....*sigh*  yeah, same old is same yet again.....🤷‍♂️🤨

"...in a age of miracles and wonder, this is a long-distance call..."

If one suspects disappointment lurks somewhere, it will be found....and another round ensues....

"It's never sounded this good before...but...."

All is subject to stubborn pursuit of perfection.  And treated as myth uncovered and fouled by the act of assuming it's IT....

...note contemporary pun.... ;)
Can't escape by just a t-shirt purchase anymore....😏

How many times have you entered $50 to deposit in your bank account and it became $5000 because the banks server was 3000 miles away?

We are just talking music here, not a lot of data and not hard to do no matter the miles away the disk is. When you watch (stream) an F1 race 10,000 miles away in 4K, how many times does Hamilton’s red Ferrari gets displayed in blue? 4K streaming is much more difficult than streaming a 16/44 song or a hires song. 
I setup very large enterprise databases and worked with Facebook/Apple/Yahoo/Comcast/banks and these companies have servers all over the world on AWS/Oracle/Azure/their own server farms and every transaction done is bit perfect, with thousands/millions of people concurrently accessing these servers and every transaction has to be bit  perfect or we would have some big issues. And this occurs over dirty WiFi or using a $1 Ethernet patch cable. Now you take an audiophile that uses a $1000 Ethernet cable going to a galvanized streamer going to a $10000 dac, I’m not worried that a 1500 byte packet will make it to my system perfectly.

@rbstehno - too logical, don’t you know audio is special?

"The digital data rides on an analog signal that can pick up noise"

I think you're trying to explain Wi-Fi, which is a Layer 2 Data Link Protocol, as is Ethernet.  Layer 3 Network Protocols, like TCP/IP, handle all the logical addressing, routing, forwarding, fragmentation and reassembly, error correction, and buffering, and diagnostics. Any 'noise' accumulated at Layer 2 simply isn't recognized at Layer 3, unless it corrupts a packet, in which case a checksum error is generated, the entire packet is discarded, and another packet retransmitted. Remember, thi is happening at 100 Mbit or Gigabit speeds, hundreds or thousands of time faster than even the highest audio signals. From a network challenge perspective, even 192KhzX24-bit audio is small beans.

I keep reading the same old stance from folks that either don’t stream or streaming for fun with their fancy analog or CD players. You know who you are :-)

It’s not about the data but about the context (emotional, physical, psychological) in which it’s delivered. Think about it before you eager to call out the cult-like belief in well designed streamers with premium parts without understanding why something works and works well over mass produced streamers. 

I have compared streamers ranging from $500 to $25K. You don’t have to spend $25K to get a great sound, but pick a streamer that is well engineered to deliver bit-perfect digital output by implementing low-noise design, stable clocking, robust power supply and isolation (ethernet noise or power rail interference). 

So why some of the streamers sound different? Because they prioritize  aforementioned underlined elements that ultimately impacts how bitstream is distributed to your DAC. 

The message should be; don’t fall for over-priced pseudo tech without due diligence be it a DAC, Streamer or Switches.