why expensive streamers

If someone hears something with different network switch, good for them. Who am I to question someone else’s enjoyment. After all, I can’t tell one scotch from another.

But technically should not be any difference. Comparison with cables is not correct. Cables that carry analog signals susceptible to RF noise. They have resistance and capacitance so, combined with one component output and another input impedance they may make small or significant difference. Digital cables, not so much.

Network switch? Tidal stream passes thousands of switches on its way to you. One more won’t make any difference. Besides, there is no "stream". Internet is all chunks, compressed and chopped into packets that are frequently traveling arriving out of order at the destination, some are lost and get re-sent. At the receiving end it all needs to be reconstructed.

That WiFi router you have also does a lot of work and is a network switch.

@tomcy6 - it all is getting filtered, error corrected and retransmitted as needed. If noise affected bits, your Word file would not come properly from a network server, email would be unreadable and digital signature verification would fail. 

There are no bit errors in network transmission.

@invalid - if it were not same bits, you would not be able to read attached PDFs :-)

Apples and oranges. Transmission without error correction and DA conversion and pure digital networks that are designed to transmit exact bits over many servers, switches, cable types, optical/electrical, under oceans and in space in chunks, out of order, with recovery if anything is lost.

We don't want that Tomahawk to miss, do we :-)

@jeffreyw - But of course :-)

@mashif - the article is about DA conversion. Jitter is not an issue in networks like Internet.

@grislybutter - me too since people claim to hear difference. I am open minded. However, I am also a former software engineer and have masters in math, singnal processing....

I can imagine that low end streamer may have weak CPU (like low power ARM) and small RAM, so it may be losing packets and not sending bits over USB in a timely fashion.

Another thing that network traffic includes other people in the household watching movies, browsing, playing games. Having network switch isolating this traffic from streamer may be beneficial, if streamer itself is a low performance device. After all, high performance would need fans and most people would not want that.

@nigeltheflash - but then adding DDC synchronized with DAC clock should be eliminating differences between streamers since it fixes USB issues. Converting packets to stream is not proprietary software, it the same Linux network stack everywhere. I am pretty sure everything is heavily buffered (tens of seconds of music), RAM is cheap this days.

@8th-note - CD won't necessarily be better. CD transports also have jitter and CD reading may be unreliable. In fact, I think FLAC stream is way more bit-perfect, than a Red Book CD data retrieval.

Better comparison would be playback of the same track off USB thumb drive - excludes network issues.

@invalid technically true, but it is like AM-FM. Both transmit analog but FM is more advanced that AM. Digital is ultimately beams of light in a fiber or modulated currents in a twisted pair or coax cable, or radio waves of a satellite link. but it is also designed to be error-free, otherwise that Word doc you are opening from a server half a globe away would be garbled.

@8th-note I am with you buddy. A decent streamer (say, $2-3K) is fine, after all, that is what decent custom PC costs - nice box. no fans, screen - it all costs company to make. $20K? No, thanks.