Why are so many people spending so much money to build “perfect” streaming system?

Because at long last digital, and in particular streaming can equal the very best sound quality available, which for decades has been vinyl. It can be done across the different quality levels of high fidelity. As an added bonus music is essentially free ($14 / month) for access to millions of albums.

I am retire and am ecstatic. I don’t have to constantly get up and can do research in my audio chair and just line up what to play next. I listen to music about three hours a day now.

There is nothing difficult about it, unless you want to make it difficult. If you already have a DAC… most contemporary CD players let you use them as a DAC. You buy a high quality streamer. You can plug it into a cheap wall wart wifi repeater so not to worry about running a cable. That is it. Download the app to your iPad or phone and go. Lots of folks here like to buy inexpensive streamers and play with their network to get better sound. But if you get a high quality streamer you don’t need to play with your network. I have a cheap Netgear router and my streamer sound as good as my high end vinyl setup.

@jjsmith 

I think the overwhelming evidence is in favor of better equipment sounding better, cables making sonic differences… etc. No analogous relationship between UFOs and audio.

@lalitk / @charles1dad …”there is no effective reasoning with this ridged mindset.”

This is very true. I have worked with hundreds of electrical design engineers, not the ones that create great audio components (like preamps and DACs), but ones that create microelectronics… microchips, DAC chips, and OP amps… etc. overall, these guys are absolutely sure they completely understand reality, far above any other human being… I mean it is Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island all over again… “we understand how things work and that is it”. They can be unbelievably closed minded… having their view that “it can’t make a difference”, therefore they refuse to hear one (ASR also comes to mind). I have some engineers that are still friends and they are on the open minded side and they have allowed me to show them otherwise.

To be honest, I think this attitude really slowed the advancement of high end audio. It took some real pioneers to look beyond the “It shouldn’t make a difference”, with such stubborn egotistical self righteousness, to listen and draw their own conclusions. Now there are lots of high end companies that hire engineers into an environment of listening is the key to evaluating a design. It is the pioneers like William Zane Johnson of Audio Research and Bill Conrad and Lew Johnson of Conrad Johnson that broke through the dogma and realized that a few measurements did not tell the whole story.

Sorry about the rant. But as a manager of multifunction departments and a corporate executive for decades, I learned to flip realities depending on which group I was speaking with. Honestly, the engineering community is the most difficult to deal with, having an incredibly narrow view of the world. The scientists are also very argumentative (I was a scientist for ten years), but they at least go back to observation to prove their point… so this softens changing reality to fit their view, mostly. 

@charles1dad 

😁👍