I don't have a streamer or a DAC and I am absolutely clueless but based on what it does, it sounds like the only reason why cheap streamers sound worse than expensive ones is because they are poorly designed and "create" issues. There should be no noise, no timing issues, a streamer just moves packages like a conveyor belt at the airport. The software would have only one way to put the packages together, in either a 500 dollar or 5000 dollar streamer.
But again, that's just my wearing an IT hat, knowing nothing about music streamers.
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Audiophile grade DAC's are all withing everyone's budget
that's just fantastic!
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@jji666 but they can hear the difference.
😊
sometimes I feel audio is like selling water:
seller: this is from mountain x, only 100 bottles a day, the purest
buyer: this is a plastic box with H2O
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@wokeuptobose I am really just here to learn. I know nothing, especially about streamers and DACs. So far what I learned here is that the streamer delivers a stream of data, like the mailman delivers my mail. I wouldn’t even know if he delivered it with a Bentley or a Fiat. It's about what lands in my mailbox?
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@nonoise what does the diagram have to do with streamers?
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@mikhailark exactly, a data stream doesn't have any other attributes and qualities, which is why I am still waiting for an explanation, what an expensive streamer does differently than one that "just works"
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@mikhailark right I am not saying there is no room for poor processing, flawed transmission. I just don't get the $1,000 vs $20,000 streamer argument.
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@cleeds every time I go to a nearby dealer, they point to the "No Loitering" sign and lock the door.
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@nigeltheflash I am sorry I am slow and thick. This is too abstract for me. And let's just focus on the "noise".
Noise from where? The machine noise? Noise in the signal?
The signal comes from a server. Travels through a lot a steps, finally arrives to a streamer. Does the streamer add noise? Or it knows how to remove the noise?
And a good streamer sends "clear" signal to the DAC?
Sorry, feel free to ignore me. Just trying to understand.
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@cleeds
I meant stream = the end result, the sum of the packets, glued back together. The serialized data. What I know from writing code for reading data from e.g., text to binary and back. But in short I have no idea. I should read up on it before asking questions.
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yes it sure does, thanks @nigeltheflash
I hear a lot about timing, slow and fast, so I have to learn about the clocking part. I would have thought when analog is converted to digital and it becomes a stream, timing is encoded in the stream, the 0s and 1s. There is no layers of data, such as content and "pace" or whatever timing means, it's all one linear series. The DAC has to figure out how to unpack it.
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@nonoise technology and AI will only make us less perfect. But the sum is.... somewhere still... not great 😎
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so, to be potentially off topic, from a software point of view, streaming is a method. It has nothing to do with data loss, error handling, the quality of the data, etc. The content (5 seconds of a cat video, pdf file or song) is converted into bytes and sent from one endpoint to another. The client endpoint will receive it and convert it back to "content". In between there is "networking stuff" that I know little about and won’t google it (so that e.g. I still don’t say stuff that would embarrass my offspring who spent 4 years in College to understand the "networking stuff".)
If you want to play 5 frames of the cat video, 5 seconds of a song, you will need to receive the data that comes in a form of a stream. It has the beginning and end, x amount of bytes. The programmer writing the software that handles the data assumes it is 100% the same data the server sent.
What we also call streaming is the concept that we don’t need to receive the 6th seconds of a song to play the first 5. We just assume that we will have it in time, before the 5th seconds of the song has played. We can add business rules to our playing procedures such as we won’t play the song unless the entire song has completed streaming (in which case, it’s not really streaming but downloading.)
I feel these concepts are easily confused - as shown in this thread. I would go on about lossless and lossy formats and compressions and how Spotify changed business rules to get around receiving all the data that was sent and "just move on and play something" and never wait for the lost pockets - if I had know more than I can google. But I don’t, music streaming is a different animal than streaming data for maps and location data that I work on.
Still, this is a very educational thread despite our different understanding/ misunderstandings of various issues around streaming...
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@nonoise
noise creeping into the many places it can from sender to receiver
what/who do you mean by sender and receiver?
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Those here who have/use local files on their own storage they stream from have commented on how much better it sounds compared to some online sources
that's because of the business rules. Playing via streaming (putting packages together as they come in vs having it all at the door) is different because of their algorithms for how to cut corners - to deal with missing/delayed packets. It's not because noise creeps in along the way. That's my understanding
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I don’t imagine anything. Here is the spotify algorithm. I don’t know about every streaming services algorithm.
If it's bit perfect, and no cutting corners, then great, I am happy to be wrong.
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I think you misunderstood me @cleeds
I wasn’t talking about A specific service. I was talking about streaming in general, since there was so much confusion here. I was actually proving the exact same bit-perfect point but had to go off to a tangent for what to do with not bit perfect transmissions.
But please call me silly if it makes you feel any better 😂
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I am back to square 1. (I told you I was slow, thick and now also silly)
With bit-perfect data transfer music providers, what does an expensive streamer does better than a basic one? Is it the data that it sends to the DAC?
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I am a big fat sealion then.
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