Takedown of pricey servers, streamers OCD HiFi guy

@jayrossi13 Excellent point. (I'll comment with that  It’s possible that his point is true and it applies to his own practices, too. But the takeaway (for me) would be that his point is true.

Agreed. He's mainly aiming at the insane markup people, and is accounting for all the factors you mention. But it's pretty clear if someone is charging enormous $$'s and is putting a cheap Chinese gamer board inside a fancy chassis, then there is chicanery at work. This doesn't happen (he mentions) with Pass or Jeff Rowland etc. He's calling out those who are putting sawdust in the meatloaf, so to speak.

That is an interesting video that does make some valid observations about some streamers and servers.  But, as he noted in the video, there are some streamers with proprietary boards and components in them that are optimized for the task.  As he noted, streamers have to store the digital files and extract those files which is a much more demanding task than streaming.  I also found it interesting that he has found that WAV is an audibly better way to store music files than FLAC; this is an observation made by others as well (my streamer stores in WAV).

There are streamers that are far more than computer boards and generic power supplies repackaged in another box.  The one I have comes in three boxes--one has a proprietary CD ripper and 8TB of storage, another box contains the streamer and the DAC, and the third box is a dedicated power supply for the streamer/DAC.  The streamer/DAC is fed power by multiple separate feeds from the power supply.  Internally, the streamer/DAC employs some fairly extreme measures to isolate sensitive functions form vibration as well as electrical interference.  One section employs a faraday cage, with the digital signal converted to optical in order to pass through the faraday cage before being converted back to an electrical signal.  Do any of these measures matter?  I don't know, but, I do get pretty decent digital sound from my setup. 

Lexicon and Oppo, all over again?