Streamer Selection - Thoughts Requested Please!

@audiotroy - I am a new here but believe your above response was directed at comments by @rbstehno so I have linked him by the @ here so he can view your post.  

From your earlier post on page one I see that you are a vendor and from what I could pick up from the verbiage, the streamer you are suggesting is the 432 EVO music server. I have no issue at all with vendor responses and welcome information to assist me in my selection.  In this case I had to take the initiative by doing the work myself to figure out who you were, the product represented and seek out the reviews/info as there were no links in your post.  I had a bit of confusion in following your comments.  I went to the review in the Absolute Sound review and figured out that the $7,800 price for the EVO server you mentioned was EVO's middle tier offering and not their entry level offering.  A bit of time in searching showed that  EVO designates their entry level server as the Standard for $3,500 - which is in my range.  You did point out the platforms upgradeability which would be a big plus. 

Net is the user management software of either LMS or Roon for the EVO is not in my wheelhouse at this time.  I also understand that in addition a to whatever management software is selected, a local player would be required to access Roon or LMS in order to establish the EVO's operating parameters.  I am not ready to take all this on and simply want to add a streamer to utilize Tidal. 

I am sure that EVO servers are top tier products and wish you success in your marketing efforts.  

let me step in here. Audiotroy, you are wrong on many fronts and don't understand how hardware/software works.

"electrictrical noise"? You bring up cpu's when you tried to explain noise. The cpu's that any 3rd party server uses are not specifically built to run Roon. For example, Auralic runs/used to use the Tesla G1 cpu. Do you think the Auralic engineers went to the Tesla chip manufacturer and told them to make a unique processor to run Roon? Do you think Aurender engineers went to Intel to ask them to build the chip they use to specifically run Roon? Come on, nobody believes that, and Intel/Apple/AMD would laugh at somebody that would come in to ask them to build a specific chip to run a specific app that you would only sell a few thousand of them, if Intel/Tesla would design/build such a cpu, it would cost millions of dollars for each cpu. Aurender claims they run a low powered Intel chip and you stated the same, but if you compare Intel cpus to Apple or AMD Ryzen cpus, intel is not low powered, why do you think Apple went away from Intel. 

Another misconception you have is your statement: "We run Roon in its own CPU core". You have no control over this, it's how Roon is built, its out of your hands. Roon uses multithreading which utilizes a single cpu, it isn't written to multitask/parallel process over multiple cpu's. This is why the bigger the music library is/ or the more endpoints you have, Roon will eventually saturate the cpu its running on, that's why if you have a large music library, you will need a faster cpu. Most enterprise software multitasks/parallel processes over all the cpu's in the server to prevent such bottlenecks.If you look at your system resources running Roon, you will notice that cpu is getting saturated whereas the other cores are idle.

Your years of testing are flawed IMO. What would you test?  What does your testing actually consist of? You bring up cpu's, do you actually test the noise difference between an M2 Apple cpu vs a Tesla G1 cpu vs the low powered Intel cpu? No. Do you actually benchmark different flavors of linux? No. Every streamer is a server, it has a cpu, memory, and an OS. How many iterations of each of these components have you tested? Did you test the Tesla G1 cpu using Ubuntu v18 vs Ubuntu v20? How about Fedora? 

Bottom line, you don't know which cpu is the noisiest. You don't know which OS is the most efficient or the best OS for say USB or i2s. I do know that most of the streaming servers run a proprietary/tainted version of Linux, and with this, you either have to have the manufacturer update/or fix any OS issues, or if they are out of business, you will have to hire a Linux hacker to tweak the system. I don't use any hacked/proprietary/tainted Linux on any of my servers. 

PS Audio AirLens. Great streamer with I2S output.  

Audiotroy, I used to use USB many years ago. Sure it worked, that doesn't mean much when the sq of USB is so bad! Why are there tens/hundreds of tweaks from companies to try to improve the sq of USB? Have you heard of the reclocker? How about the off-ramp device? Femto clock? Jitterbug? IFI cable that separates the power from the data? IFI Ipurifier? Regen? I can go on, but why.

Also, in some of the recent stereophile reviews of high end dacs (even the review years ago stating the dcs network module sounds better than usb), the reviewer preferred the sq using the other inputs other than USB. Also, some of the best 2023 dacs don't even include USB. 

Since you are a dealer. if somebody buys a dac and uses USB, you will be right there to recommend 1 of many tweak products to make usb sound better.

@rbstehno 

You have long believed USB is categorically bad. Tech keeps on evolving, if one is using a dedicated streamer with USB output, USB is equally capable of delivering higher performance equivalent to SPDIF/AES and i2S. The final sound quality would also depend on implementation of these protocols within partnering DAC. Jitterbug was specifically designed for applications where general purpose laptop or computer being used as streamer as general purpose computers are inherently noisy. 

i2s requires careful selection of components as handshake between the two components is not given. I guess these handshake issues pave way to DDC re-clockers. IMO, they are totally unnecessary if you are using a high quality streamer + DAC. 

DAC’s with Ethernet cards (renderer) are the way to the future for anyone looking for one box solution. I agree, this type of component has a potential of a very high resolution sound. But then again, someone with deep pockets may disagree, you know that separates vs one box argument.

When it comes to streaming, there are so many ways to skin the cat!