What are you streaming tonight?

@big_greg I am an electronics engineer turned software engineer. In fact, I played a lot with audio (and image) formats. For folks getting into digital music it makes sense to educate themselves about the basics of digital audio: what is PCM, FLAC, etc. On Wikipedia and elsewhere. I don't want to go into voluminous explanations in this forum. It is the DAC that 'makes' the analog 'music' not the streamer etc. The latter can differ on ergonomics, but if it is not broken, and if if feeds the bytes to the DAC, it doesn't matter what it is. There is a lot of misinformation floating around, created by folks who want to sell some 'better' (and more expensive) equipment. @reubent will need to form his own opinion eventually, based in part on input from folks like us, Reddit forums, and best of all -- personal experience. 

I'll go with "personal experience". But I am frugal by nature, so I will not over-spend if I don't hear a difference.

@ghjuvanni I agree with going with personal experience.  Mine has been different than yours. 

So in effect, you're saying that the input into the DAC makes no difference whatsoever - a computer, a Raspberry Pi, a high-end standalone streamer, ethernet, USB, coax, BNC, optical, I2S, etc. other than the bit rates they are capable of transmitting.

@reubent The Bluesound is a good "frugal" starting point if you're more concerned with ease of use, affordability, and versatility than ultimate sound quality.  It has a great app and does just about every music service and music format.

Bluesound’s (DAC) sound is OK, but underwhelming. That’s why I no longer use it’s internal DAC. External-DAC-wise I think we are at a point where it is difficult to improve things any more (although marketing will try to convince people otherwise). Which is great -- we can concentrate on music itself and stop obsessing about equipment :-)