Point of higher priced streamer?

@yyzsantabarbara 
Thank you for your response to my question regarding room correction. I will read the threat that you have pointed me to.

Regarding your suggestion of replacing the USB connection by optical to prevent analog noise contamination riding along a digital signal in your microRendu, it appears that an important enhancement to decrease noise  in the microRendu is to use a linear power supply to power it, instead of its original switching power supply. 

There is an interesting post in audio science review (ASR) which shows how the performance of the microRendu improves significantly when you power it with a decent linear power supply.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/hardware-review-and-measurements-of-sonor...

This just reinforces what I was saying earlier with respect to streamers. With given bit-perfect output, which all streamers are capable of, and low jitter levels, if they even matter these days, the biggest difference unknown affecting streaming sound quality is electro-magnetic noise and interference. i.e. clean power and minimal noise transmission on cables. Isolating the heavy processing upstream via optical will provide incremental improvements, but the biggest improvement will come from a clean power supply. Linear power supplies are almost requisite in this regard. And if you are using USB then having a DAC that does not draw it's power over the USB 5V power bus will also help. 

In my case, I found the most (cost) effective solution is to run the heavy processing Roon core upstream on the network, and then use the highly optimized and lightweight OpticalRendu to isolate the input from noise. With LPS's across the board of course. If you think that the optical isolation only provides marginal improvements then you could go with an Allo USBridge Signature or Digione Signature (SPDIF) as a network endpoint - superb value for those devices. Powered by the Allo Shanti LPS, which is also a very good value. Regardless, you are talking about roughly $1000 or so for a good network endpoint solution that will sound every bit as good (if not better) than a $10k streamer. I have done an A/B comparison of my opticalRendu + upstream Roon Core vs a Lumin streamer and the isolated optical endpoint solution sounded better. It's important to note that the Lumin was just being used as a streamer and I am not talking about their built-in DAC's, which are actually pretty good. But that's a separate conversation if one is looking for an all-in-one streamer/dac combo.

Can we list some  LPS for the streamers. I am ready to buy ne today if I can get a list streamers to consider. Something for the microRendu would be ideal but for this thread any LPS.

Allo Shanti - https://allo.com/sparky/shanti.html

Let me see if I understood this correctly.

On one end we have streaming services, Spotify,Todal, Qobuz and for simplification I’m counting Roon for this catefory as well. These service will take the individual tracks from their data location and apply some algorith that converts the original file for the appropriate quality needed for the streamer. Next thing is the streaming service itself, which basically cuts the track to datagrams, let’s say 5ms slices and wraps these to tcp protocol (seems to be protocol for atleast Spotify and Roon, don’t know if Tidal and Qobuz are using udp).

Now at this point there would be a steady flow of individual datagrams to the streamer. If any of the tcp packages would drop, the tcp stack in streamer software would just ask the ”server” Spotify, Roon to resend the package. As long as the datagrams are coming in fast enough network package loss shouldn’t affect the SG, but in a situation where the network delay is longer that the cache time of the streamer it’s forced to drop the datagram. Based on the error correction schema this might not be a problem, if for example 40ms of audio is distributed in 8 datagrams. Each datagram would overlap 5ms with the previous one, so loosing one would not affect the integrity of data. More robbust error correction means more bandwidth is needed, if I understood correctly typically these schemas would be applied dynamically.

Now the streamer has received enough datagrams to fulfull the cache to ”protect” the flow to the dac. On the streamer’s RJ45/Wifi receiver chip there is incoming flow of datagrams and at the same time as the same packets are pushed out through USB/spdif port using AES3 protocol. This most like the point where jitter and electrical noise would be interfiering the output signal of spdif for example. How the missing data in spdif flow would affect SG is not clear to me, maybe someone else could open this in more detail.

Now if I have roughly understood the whole flow correctly it’s quite easy to understand why one streamer - dac combination sounds better that other. 

How about streaming content with a video source. I think they drop packets if there is a problem in the transmission. However, dropped packets are just part of the the streaming quality issue. Actually not a big deal for me and I do not think this a big deal for most people. I am more interested in the issue of electrical noise that people bring up as a cause of a lot of problems in the streaming chain. 

A couple of posts above are saying that a Fibre optical cable is less of a benefit than an LPS on the streamer. Heck even ASR is saying that and they are only about measurements.

Maybe the differences I hear between my Pi/Digi+ SPDIF and M5 are related to the quality of the power supply used in the M5 vs the iFi switching power supply I use with the Pi; I don't know...   Using a Pi with the Allo DigiOne Signature SPDIF board and a good quality linear power supply to feed the clean side of the output would be a great comparison with my M5 or any more expensive streamer.

I've read various posts here and on audiophile style about reported improvements by replacing the internal Lumin U1 Mini power supply with an external SBooster.    The Hans Beekhuyzen Channel on YouTube has a lot of interesting videos/reviews about streamers and power supplies.

Once I recharge my audio funds I would like to try a linear power supply with the EtherREGEN.   When I had the RME ADI 2 FS DAC I was shopping external linear power supplies and Teddy Pardo, Paul Hynes, SBooster, Uptone UltraCap, and Farad were all on my radar.  I ended up selling the RME before I purchased one for comparison.   RME's opinion on replacing their stock supply with an upgraded linear supply can be read here: https://forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.php?id=28734 ; it's about what you would expect, similar to this thread...