Takedown of pricey servers, streamers OCD HiFi guy

My take on value components:
1. If one assumes parts quality is associated with sound quality. I want high quality parts vs. lower quality parts.
2. Engineering expertise, how those parts are put together. This is more difficult to ascertain, one has to acquire knowledge in order to make value judgement.  I assume this judgement may be theoretical, perhaps many roads to highest sound quality. Costs here may vary widely,  R&D.
3. Business model, lower profit per unit manufactured.  Is direct sales model most efficient, could be. Small manufacturer vs. large? Are any economies of scale at work here?

4. Subjective sound quality. I would have to hear all streamers, servers in my system to judge sq.
And so, best value would be highest parts quality, best engineering, low profit business model and best sq in my system. Obviously I'll never know if any component I purchase is best value. And so we're left to subjective estimations of value, right back to square one.

A few comments about this video . It is true that servers are computers and most of the time are built with parts that you can buy of the shelf except for company like aurender,melco,auralic....
This is just a fraction of the cost .Very good power supply are expensive and computer audio requires some very specific and very good psu .
Another big cost is the development cost for a well tuned software. What makes very good digital front end is these three points : the right pc parts ,excellent psu , well tuned software .
with that you can achieve really magical level of sound quality that I felt was impossible to reach with digital audio .
In my own diy efforts server-player , I have about 5k invested in parts only ... I get excellent sq but at a cost .

tatyana69223 posts02-12-2021 2:08pm
daleberlin16 posts02-12-2021 1:54pm

"I disagree that he can tell the difference between a FLAC and WAVE file. A decompressed FLAC is identical bit for bit to the original WAVE file. "

You know so little

Its a fact sir. Oh no, you didn’t spend $1000 on a USB cable did you?

a music server is just another computer application. Has nothing go to do with making sound. Just serving up files from storage like any other program.


The streamer is where things start to get interesting. The streamer takes the data from the files served up by the server and produces the digital electric signal that the DAC then uses to produce the music in real time. Streamers can have an effect on the sound quality but in practice it may be hard to tell.

The DAC is by far the biggest factor in practice regarding the end sound quality in the digital streaming pipeline.
Keeping jitter to a minimum is key for good sound quality. The wire connection from streamer to DAC can also play a part in regards to jitter levels into the DAC as a result of signal reflections.

Also noise in the circuit that makes it into the signal from streamer to DAC may also have an effect. I like wireless connections from server to streamer for that reason...isolation for the music making components from the wired computer network. Wired circuits can be very prone to noise. Won’t hurt the computer programs that run on it but might hurt the music making process if it makes it’s way into the circuit between streamer and dac.

Last year I decided to replace playing CDs with storing them on a hard drive and playing them through a server connected to my vintage MSB Platinum DAC. The salesman persuaded me to get a Bluesound Vault 2i which copse CDs to its hard drive and corrects detectable bit errors in part by reading a CD more than once. I ran onto some difficulties which included extreme complication whenever I added a new CD or download and the impossibility of listing each piece of music by its composer. With help I got a copy of the library stored in the Vault 2i onto a folder in my laptop. My complete entire collection took up a little more than 30 gB, something that could easily fit a 50 gB flash drive. I made a separate folder for each composer and I use the flash drive rather than the hard drive. The Vault 2i can get near HD for any classical music station though for four classical music stations when the weather is right I still use an FM tuner for the better resolution than HD has to offer.
I suspect there might have been a cheaper way to do this but I do not think far more expensive servers have anything better.
On the subject of rationalization dismissing extremely costly components I have some skepticism. Cables costing 5 figures advertise such expedients as litz or ribbon construction to ameliorate skin effect at high frequencies. If you calculate the effective loss of cross sectional ares of an 8 gauge speaker wire in series with a 4 Ohm speaker, the difference is only a few hundredths of an Ohm resistance increase at 20 kHz over DC resistance, which could cause a few hundredths of a dB attenuation at frequencies we can't hear. This the junk science used to sell such speakers does not get you what you pay for. How do we know what other deceptions might be in the audio industry.
There is another reason I take extreme prices with a grain of salt. There is a $350,000 pair of monoblocks which can be built for approximately $2000. I do not know whether the $350,000 model even uses polypropylene filter capacitors in the high voltage power supplies instead of the inferior electrolytic kind you see in "high end" amplifiers costing $20,000 or more. This is why I design and build my own amplifiers.