toro3
268 posts
Interesting conversation. @benanders @yage what streamers have you owned/used? Yage it looks like you’re using a Raspberry Pi in your main system - I’m assuming this is still the case, yes?
The last streamer I owned was the Oppo Sonica DAC with a company-approved power supply modification. It’s still a fine DAC, but once the parent company killed the disc player lab in CA, the Sonica app and streamer functions failure rate became increasingly problematic until I was spending far more time dealing with freezes than listening to music. The DAC works and tests well enough that a used one can still sell for what I paid for the “whole package,” if not more - how often does that happen for audio kit, eh!?
Anyway, the Sonica “streamer” was supported for less than a year post-release, then every buyer was largely SOL. Since then I’ve had a few “loaner” streamers visit my system (purely for the curiosity of others - not for feeling need myself), some of considerably more cost and sophistication than the Oppo Sonica all-in-one. Blind testing didn’t result in anything consistent for the device owners, so I consider that there wasn’t [noticeable] audible difference in what various streamers were doing in my system. I purposefully omit brand/model names to prevent anyone online feeling need to dogpile to the contrary. To each their own on that matter.
Presently, I use a RPi for streamer and USB-to-DAC (have used one of the coax / TOSLINK-out hats too, which also was fine). I have a couple of 4b’s lying around but haven’t taken the time to swap out the 3b+ I started on. The 3b+ by design does have (minimal) USB bus issues in my use case, but a few split-second glitches here and there between tracks apparently aren’t enough to trigger my “FIX IT!” response. Another project for a holiday someday!
I should have said “freeware” not “open source” for the streamer OS, since there are many of the former for the RPi platform. If whichever service I’m using is discontinued, all I have to do is reformat an SD card. There are some very impressive streamers / processors on the market that use the RPi as the device’s computer. There’s probably something to be said for that ;)
Let’s not forget the intention here is not to argue whether streamers’ quality scales with device price (zero evidence for) or if there is audible difference between streamers (zero evidence for; limited evidence against). My point was there are more demonstrably sensible ways for OP to get audio kit performing better… as long as OP knows what “better” would be in the particular setup.
I think music source files of known parameters and/or DSP would be the most logistically sound (pun!) options here.