Confirmation bias, your brain playing tricks on you…all these standard lines are used by those who either 1) can’t hear; 2) never heard and have no experience, and 3) can’t afford to own
And this is the standard line used in response to allegations of confirmation bias. #3 is especially obnoxious -- "your system is not resolving enough."
It really does no good to have this debate in a macro sense. Each individual tweak, type of gear, etc., has its own likelihood (or lack thereof) in influencing sound.
There are CDPs that use tubes ; is it really nuts for a streamer to do the same.
CD players that use tubes include the analog stage of the DAC. That may influence sound. A pure streamer takes the PCM stream (packetized) from the LAN port and outputs it via USB or SPDIF (or other). There’s no analog stage. Putting tubes in an entirely digital data processing device is beyond silly. If it affected sound at all, it would likely be detrimental since a tube is more sensitive than solid state to many electrical issues that theoretically could affect a streamer.
The introduction of the Aurender streamer into my system introduced a very natural and sweet tone that reminds of good tube gear
Let’s break this down: (1) if used as a server only (with another device - a streamer -- on the other end of the network attached to a DAC/with an internal DAC) then the server cannot possibly affect sound quality except as to DSP processing or similar - i.e. the bit perfect signal received by the streamer is the same no matter what machine is transmitting that signal across the network; (2) if used as a server/streamer, then yes, it can theoretically affect sound quality, but only in the sense that the theory goes that the processing at the server end can be electrically noisy and detrimentally affect sound - so a really well designed server *might* be able to avoid some of that, but most likely using a server/streamer combo device isn’t optimizing sound quality if it makes a difference at all. It’s possible you like sub-optimized sound, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
it’s stuff like this that make all of us the deserving objects of ridicule from our non- audiophile friends.
I think the point here is that audiophiles look silly putting rocks on their speakers, using directional colored fuses, and making claims about digital networks that make no sense to the experts that really know how they work. Then the anger and ganging up that occurs when someone makes a point using science and engineering just exacerbates this.
I am a big proponent of being open minded and considering anything, at least for a minute. But you still do have to engage the logical/science part of your brain at some point. Science hasn’t explained everything yet. So observation has its place in starting a thought process. But that also doesn’t mean that network gear has magical qualities that literally cannot exist given how networks work.
All of that said, I don’t know that I would have started a thread just to make fun of someone. I think a response in that thread that explained the science and engineering behind the server-streamer concept would have been sufficient.