Would you still pay $10k or more for a turntable not full analog front end these days ?

Do all knives cut the same if they have the same sharpness ?

No.

No, I don’t buy $$$ power cables either. I know physics. What is your point?

@mikhailark My point is simply that more expensive streamers can and do sound much better than a $2k streamer while you think a $2k streamer sounds as good as pricier streamers because you write code and therefore know everything for certain. Again, do you honestly think all the experienced people here who’ve spent >$2k on a streamer because it sounded better are just fools who’ve been duped? Because that’s exactly what you’re saying here.

@soix - I said everyone is free to spend their money the way that want. They are also free to think what they want. They may even disagree with professionals. Their choice.

But stream is exactly the same in $1K streamer (actually, in $50 streamer) as it is in $10K streamer. 

$2K streamer has better screen, nice chassis and good app to control it. Someone engineered and made custom device and needs to be paid. But this has nothing to do with bits.

I am not naming any names and I am not ASR guy that tries to argue everything to a bitter end. I provide professional opinion. What are going to do with it - your choice.

got it thanks @inna

in that case, for the table alone, if I had 10K, I wouldn't. It would be a waste on me.

@grislybutter - Net is designed to deliver perfect bits. It transmits ridiculous amount of information every second and a packet becomes garbled it is rejected by the receiver and retransmitted.

Can someone imagine military encrypted data to come in a non-perfect way? Legal documents modified? Guess not. Audio stream is basically a file, operation is no different from opening WAV file from a network share like NAS.

No one really develops their own network stacks except major OS manufacturers. It is a complex software that is extremely expensive to develop. So network code comes embedded in the device OS which is typically some flavor of Linux.

What I can imagine is noise added to USB cable that goes from streamer to the DAC. Like by a bad power supply. Or DAC overly sensitive to the USB issues. А DDC reclock/isolation unit may resolve issues then.

But seriously, USB chips are also standard. No one writes custom USB transmission code. USB driver is part of OS or provided by a major driver developer. Ex Denafrips uses USB code from Thesycon.