I've never used the Chromecast the cheapest I have is a raspberry pi4. As a roon endpoint it's indistinguishable from streamers I've had costing a lot more. I actually listen, with my ears, not my eyes. If your experience is not listening blind then it's flawed and useless except as a control for why we need to listen blind. Measurements are good to get a basic idea, I've never chosen a component based on measurements alone.
Point of higher priced streamer?
Hello,
Assuming I have separate DAC, and I just want to play songs from iPad by Airplay feature.
In this case, I need a streamer to receive music from my iPad -> DAC.
What’s the point of high price streamer? I’m bit surprised that some streamers are very high priced.
From my understanding, there should be no sound quality difference.
(Streaming reliability and build quality, I can see it but I do not see advantages in terms of sound quality.)
Am I missing something? If so, please share some wisdom.
Assuming I have separate DAC, and I just want to play songs from iPad by Airplay feature.
In this case, I need a streamer to receive music from my iPad -> DAC.
What’s the point of high price streamer? I’m bit surprised that some streamers are very high priced.
From my understanding, there should be no sound quality difference.
(Streaming reliability and build quality, I can see it but I do not see advantages in terms of sound quality.)
Am I missing something? If so, please share some wisdom.
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- 307 posts total
LOL!!! This is very funny. I totally missed this part. Hilarious! Especially if “backed” by the world famous & renowned ASR. How do you know? Or you just KNOW? Please read the results of the ASR tests of Roon's implementation of Chromecast Audio (CA) streaming, which are backed by actual experimental data. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/review-and-measurements-of-chromecast-aud...Perhaps you don't understand the plots. Here are the conclusions: “1. The CAST audio functionality of Google Chrome is horrid. There is no excuse for it to be butchering even simple 16-bit signals as it did. While audibly it is not as dire as it looks, I still would avoid it if you can. By the way, there are multiple other sources that praise the CA as an excellent device for getting into streaming, for example, http://https//www.whathifi.com/us/google/chromecast-audio/review and specifically as a Roon streamer, for example: http://https//community.roonlabs.com/t/chromecast-audio-sound-quality/45972 Forgive me for paying more attention to actual experimental data than to hearsay opinions, no matter how many LOLs expressions are used to stress these opinions. Paying $50 bucks to try out whether I like Roon or not, instead of spending several hundreds of dollars on other streamers with doubtful performance improvements over the CA, such as the SOtM SMS-200 and the Sonore microRendu Streamers, makes perfect sense to me. If you look at the J-tests for both the the SOtM SMS-200 and the Sonore microRendu Streamers, which are considerably more expensive than the CA, you can see that their noise performance degrades considerably if you use them with their stock switching power supplies. |
Apple only supports 44.1/16 max for music and what I remember, the earlier ones (and I think the one you were using is quite old) resampled everything to 48KHz with questionable math accuracy. No mention in your posts of actually using a Chromecast, just some interest in it, but the DACs you have listed using I don't remember being well known for jitter reduction. Chromecast had high jitter on optical out and optical is more jittery in general. I believe you just discovered recently a setting in the Node2i that fixes a known issue (I had same problem) and you use it in your headphone system, so have you truly done a 1:1 level matched comparison? When people say they have "compared" things, there is more than going off memory. You need to actually do a 1:1 level comparison somewhat coincident in time. Most of your comparative examples are "troubled" and are you using your new unit in USB mode? |
- 307 posts total