Takedown of pricey servers, streamers OCD HiFi guy

@hilde45,

Old news but I would take his videos with grain of salt 😊

I say this, it’s convenient to berate a product and overlook R&D, resources put together to bring that finished products to the market.

“It seems logical to me -- especially when he prices out what some of the internal components are”

Just ask him how many servers he has built and sold.....

Your comments are always tinged with a bit of healthy scepticism. Keep following your nose and like many others you might discover that in audio, price in not always a good indicator of product performance especially in digital audio.

“price in not always a good indicator of product performance especially in digital audio.”

Very true, different strokes for different folks. Some people are happy with raspberry pi 4 in their closet, others are ecstatic with Taiko Extreme 😊

To the OP, you can buy a watch that will keep accurate time for $20, or you can pay $20k for a watch that also keeps accurate time.  Pride of ownership is a powerful consumer motivation.  The expensive watch will look and feel really nice, but it won't keep better time and that's entirely besides the point.  You don't have to spend gobs of money to get good audio performance, but the best will cost you serious coin.

thought that with all I had read about jitter, and clock timing, etc. there might be something to very expensive streaming/serving

Jitter and clock timing are solved issues and have been for about 10 years. If there is anything you need to take with a grain of salt it's this. Raspberry Pi 4 and a competent built $200 DAC will perform beyond the threshold of human audiblility.