Point of higher priced streamer?

Well said. Spot on! Good things happen to those who try.

I'd just encourage people who really want to enjoy their music at a higher level to keep an open mind with respect to some of this stuff and realize that yea, better hardware and software can provide better results in the right circumstances.

@ironlung

A.You are talking about something different - upstream services/clients *intentionally* pulling a different resolution or transcoding/decoding to a different format/resolution/shaping/whatever. Of course the data output from those processes will be different. I think most of us know this. What I was talking about was that any streamer set to a baseline setting of not modifying a file and simply sending that data to its output, is usually referred to as “bit-perfect” output and will have identical 1’s and 0’s with the same source file/stream. Bit-perfect implies that the source data has not had a single bit modified. If you can’t compare two streamers in this same apples-to-apples way then it’s pointless.

2. With all due respect the file format stuff makes no sense. Of course a lossless FLAC and a lossy MP3 file will be different and thus sound different. And different file types exist because they serve different purposes - compression formats like FLAC exist to save space at the expense of encoding/decoding time. Most compression formats allow one to specify the level of compression. Even a zip file can compress the same original file at different levels - the result is that the compressed file will be different. But once uncompressed they will again be identical. Another aspects of different file formats are security and recovery. Regardless I assumed that this was a given to the discussion. I will guarantee you that any given source file that is compressed with any LOSSLESS format like FLAC or ALAC will result in an identical bit-perfect output from 2 streamers if they have no additional settings to modify said file/stream. (A stream and a file basically the same thing to an application reading them btw - they are usually wrapped in buffers and the underlying process deals with pulling the bytes off of disk or off an http stream respectively).

As for proprietary storage formats like Kaleidoscope, they do this to optimize the performance of and add features relevant to their domain. But the same source file will be bit-perfect identical when read off a Kaleidoscope disk or a ZFS disk array or raided windows NTFS or whatever. Unless they are intentionally modifying the data, which includes lossy compression like MP3 or JPEG or MP4.

I wondered how long it would take to see through the apples to oranges comparison. At any rate take the apple 320kb Mp3 and orange FLAC through identical streamers to identical amps and speakers and I wonder how many could tell the apple from the orange without knowing which was which of course. 

Obviously nobody can tell apples from oranges if eaten in a blind test controlled environment 🙄

@thyname  Better yet, a 100 grams of apples and 100 grams of blueberries both have the same amount of carbs (12g) - hence they "measure" the same.  Should they taste the same? ;-)  As Nelson Pass likes to say..."we just aren't measuring the right things."