Would you still pay $10k or more for a turntable not full analog front end these days ?

@total111 - certainly. Conversion to analog is a wholly different subject.

The issue is in pure digital, and not just digital like with jitter, but computer networks. Streamers. Routers. Firewalls.

@total111 - the question is indeed purely digital. It is about streamer as a computer. Streamer makes network requests to the cloud and routes packets over USB. Analog conversion is a different subject. There is no analog in the streamer.

So the question was - what is exactly different in $10K streamer as compared to $1K.

Of course. LPs are often much better mastered. So LP, recorded at 24/96 often sounds way better than any stream OR even 24/96 from HD Tracks. This is not because analog is inherently better, but because mastering is better. I rarely actually listen to LPs I own, but I do listen to them recorded into 24/192.

I would NOT pay for a streamer more than $1-2K. Sorry, I am a software engineer. :-)

@inna - you had to upgrade digital b/c network and computer speed was insufficient for high resolutions. Now you can have 24/192 pretty much everywhere along with DSD. This does not have to be upgraded.

Actually, good analog is quite a bit harder to engineer and make. LPs often have better mastering and yes, they sound better than CDs mastered to sound good in a car. 15" IPS reel is a nice media for recording. Cassette? Not really. Maybe Nak Dragon still performs.

I will take 24/192 ADC recording over any cassette.

@soix -are you a network software engineer? I wrote code that used in these streamers. Yeah, I am a minority. Guess what? Network engineers ARE a minority in general population, not everyone is educated in the field. And yes, streams and Word documents are same thing from transmission perspective.

You are free to spend money on anything you want, its a free country. People buy supplements since they know better than doctors, so what. They buy ’performance’ chips for their cars. So?

No, I don’t buy $$$ power cables either. I know physics. What is your point? To convince me that code that I wrote somehow works differently because someone thinks it should? Really?

Somehow people trust their doctors but never trust engineers. Right.

@soix - thank you, I know how computers and technology works fully and completely. They are all identical Linux boxes, just fancy cases and screens.

If you think there are some sort of "bit errors" or "jitter" on the Net, think why is that Word document opens perfectly after travelling half of a globe over 100s or switches, fiber, electric, radio, satellite transmission and so on, converted to analog and back 100s of times.

Please spare me lectures on network stacks, OK? The transmission is designed to be reliable even in nuclear war.

@soix - I said everyone is free to spend their money the way that want. They are also free to think what they want. They may even disagree with professionals. Their choice.

But stream is exactly the same in $1K streamer (actually, in $50 streamer) as it is in $10K streamer. 

$2K streamer has better screen, nice chassis and good app to control it. Someone engineered and made custom device and needs to be paid. But this has nothing to do with bits.

I am not naming any names and I am not ASR guy that tries to argue everything to a bitter end. I provide professional opinion. What are going to do with it - your choice.

@soix - your question includes multiple other components. Please re-read my information. I said bits come identical from $50 device and from $50K device. It is trivial to verify having proper equipment.

Now, you are changing this to "sounds different". In this case you have to consider the entire chain. Maybe DAC is over sensitive to RF noise? I don't know. "Sounds" is subjective. Did they stage experiment properly? Who knows.

I know that amp that looks nicer to me also sounds better to me :-) and this is normal since our perception is not isolated. 

@grislybutter good for you, so you already know everything you need.

@grislybutter - Net is designed to deliver perfect bits. It transmits ridiculous amount of information every second and a packet becomes garbled it is rejected by the receiver and retransmitted.

Can someone imagine military encrypted data to come in a non-perfect way? Legal documents modified? Guess not. Audio stream is basically a file, operation is no different from opening WAV file from a network share like NAS.

No one really develops their own network stacks except major OS manufacturers. It is a complex software that is extremely expensive to develop. So network code comes embedded in the device OS which is typically some flavor of Linux.

What I can imagine is noise added to USB cable that goes from streamer to the DAC. Like by a bad power supply. Or DAC overly sensitive to the USB issues. А DDC reclock/isolation unit may resolve issues then.

But seriously, USB chips are also standard. No one writes custom USB transmission code. USB driver is part of OS or provided by a major driver developer. Ex Denafrips uses USB code from Thesycon.

@lewm - they are delivered without any losses over USB connection as are bits you write and read from USB flash drive or a hard disk. Else you would write one thing and read another. USB does not lose anything, ever, unless media (SSD, flash) is defective. There is no "timing" there.

Of course, it is another story, if you connect over optical or SPDIF....

@jlbkmb1958 - if recording was made and mastered digitally, there is no reason to convert it back to analog. The fewer conversions, the better. 

@soix - details please. How does power cable or linear power supply affect running code in the CPU or a network card operation..

No, no one actually offer anything apart from "just listen". You can just rest your case now, you obviously don’t understand how networks operate. Hey, even Denafrips main engineer explains that, but who he is after all, nobody.

Perhaps also call Tidal and tell them to pass over to Amazon (or whatever cloud they rent) to upgrade power cables, install "musical" SSDs and place an order for LAN "Silencers" since they improve stuff and and this will be great for the bottom line - both Tidal and Amazon. I wonder what will happen.

Also, if they use Google cloud, shame, because Google farms are designed and built on crappiest and cheapest computers possible, designed to fail. I wonder how is that FLACs are not affected.