Higher End DACs

What’s this a sales pitch for a over priced computer to stream Qobuz? If you really want to keep all that noise down have the server in a different room and connect through ethernet problem solved. CPU latency isn’t a problem streaming over the internet neither is execution time they use ARM chips for the most part not x86. 

I am trying my best not to make my posts a sales pitch, but to provide insights about we have observed and what we think is going on.

re your first point, the two modern choices of getting data to the DAC are a) Renderer in the DAC as data entry channel and b ) via USB to a USB receiver 

of the top line DAC’s we have seen, and tried out and reports we have received, USB has a nose ahead of IP in the SQ race.

A major high end DAC manufacturer actually recommends removing their Renderer module for an audible sonic uptick

it is a trade off between noise coming from LAN activities against noise coming from the USB receiver

To your second point, we have found that latency maters both for OS activities in the CPU and for interestingly for the LAN network and the internet backbone behind it.

For a long long time, we could not understand why real time streaming sounded noticeably better in the Netherlands than in the US.  The SQ delta between onboard storage and streaming in the Netherlands was quite small, whereas the gap at some customer sites in the US was huge.  Well guess what, a lower the latency of the network connection to the streaming services server resulted in noticeably better sound.  In the Netherlands there has been for quite a while a glass backbone to the IP infrastructure with very low latency and that was the SQ edge In Holland

we can even hear the SQ delta between streaming and onboard storage get smaller at night as the latency of the connection reduces because of lower traffic.

This being said you can still get very good and enjoyable sound quality from streaming even when the difference is quite noticeable.  We don’t come across many installations where the network latency is so high that it results in a sound we don’t want to listen to and can’t enjoy

The zero and ones are exactly the same, but the RF sauce that comes with it Is latency influenced and sounds different

I hope the above is helpful in describing the RF landscape that effects Audiophile sound reproduction

The RF "sauce" is not latency influenced. How much RF is bandwidth influenced. If you are making the router/switch work hard (latency has little impact on that), then the RF signature goes up.

soundtest3

A major high end DAC manufacturer actually recommends removing their Renderer module for an audible sonic uptick ...

Which manufacturer is that?

RF is the elephant in the room. The invisible elephant that changes shape and size with every digital tweak ...but still remains to affect the DAC. It's all because we have clocked digital devices proximate to the highly sensitive D/A.

Ahhh...but what if you could reduce RF to the minimum. So only room ambient remains?  Easy: put your entire digital chain inside a RF shielded enclosure (like my RF-STOP box). Only optical out; only optical in; and well isolated AC input.
It means audiophiles have to reconsider how they deal with high end audio tweaks. No single point product fixes the RF issue. No single manufacturer is dealing with all products RF emissions.
But today we can put our whole works into a Faraday box, follow a few simple principles for I/O and the elephant goes away.