I need help to select a music streamer

Geoff,

You sound extremely knowledgeable and you certainly bring up a good point.  I am a beginner in the hobby and I have dug deep over the past three years to learn as much as I can.  There are people in this group that are so impressive and they are willing to share some of the best knowledge in the industry.  

Thank you for your input.  Wonder what your background is.  Sounds like you too have a scientific mind.

@geoffkait not quite, it is also possible for bad test design or mishandling to effect one component and not another, so a positive can also be false.

Positives, whether false or not, are awfully hard to find.  That has to mean that it is difficult to demonstrate audible differences (for amps, cables, digital sources/resolutions) in a controlled environment. If it was easy, cable and amp manufacturers would be yelling it from the rooftops, no?

On a related matter - there are very few speaker distortion comparisons as well. Yet speakers, I'm told, introduce the majority of the distortion in the chain. That's also interesting.

ahofer
@geoffkait not quite, it is also possible for bad test design or mishandling to effect one component and not another, so a positive can also be false.

>>>>But that case would be a negative result, not a positive one, for the component that was mishandled. That falls under the heading “error in system.” It wasn’t a false positive, it was a negative. I only gave two examples of things that can go wrong. Obviously there are many others such as operator error, unfavorable weather, system not revealing enough, cables or components not broken in, etc. In any case, this highlights why it’s important for multiple blind tests to be performed on multiple systems by multiple testers. 

Does the Bluesound have the capability to play MQA?  Would the Bluesound sound better or as good as the Bel Canto if I added expensive digital coax cable like Chocolate Audioquest?  This would cost $1,000 less than the Bel Canto.

Bluesound does a partial decoding of MQA, if I recall correctly.
FWIW, I find higher resolution to be just as good or better than MQA.
That 'secret sauce' recipe is something that I don't want to touch.- Like Dolby.
B