Funny how streaming/digital still chases that analog benchmark.

@audio2design........ @audio2design........ bro you are so full of sea monkey poo its amazing .

99.9% of the pontificating here have no clue what is actually being recorded. You have never heard what is coming off a microphone and what is being recording. You blather on about R-R without a clue of all the artifacts that bring what is played back away from the actual music that was played.  You like the result, often, but personal preference is not an absolute and for others their preference is much different.

Properly mastered for the medium, yes that $150 Chinese DAC presents a more accurate, more honest to what was played, and if live, a more accurate rendition of the live performance than that expensive turntable or R-R you covet. Sure that room with the expensive speakers and crappy acoustics may benefit from a more centered image from the poor crosstalk of vinyl. It can help compensate for the acoustic mess. That hiss on R-R can help extract details lost in the distortion of that expensive tube gear and that compression from magnetic saturation can emulate loudness compensation at typical non realistic listening levels. But all that is just painting a pig.

@larry5729,

I totally agree with you and you are not deaf, the ones who hear superior sound from vinyl are in denial and in nostalgia.

Vinyl by design and laws of physics, can NOT record base frequencies and hence need trickery like RIAA curve matching to get it to barely sound reasonable.  The magic is always in the phono preamp & the RIAA filters.

Get one proper DAC and you are done, you can listen to the original recording 5000 miles away without losing a single bit.

Audio2design .... spoken like a pontificating want to be of EITHER  analog or digital? Might we be a poor batista of questionable descent .... namely not irish? I pose to you this my questionable lad... have you ever heard a fine digital or analog system? My offer stands open to you as well....Irish or not... to hear a fine analog system. I promise to not let your irishness detract from your welcome there lad

Audiophile network switches are snake oil. A $35 netgear learning bridge will do EXACTLY the same thing. Packets whizz around at 10 Gbits/sec on these guys, you think they need to introduce anything special for 300kHz at best.

What a joke...

Before you say anything, I do work for Broadcom as a senior software engineer and we design almost 80% of the routing & bridging chips in the world, and I do know how they work.

All you need to make sure is that you keep them (especially the walwart power supply) away from sensitive phono lines, that is all.

Cakycom....... PREACH BROTHER!!!! AS A 27 year it professional who knows ios PREACH!!!!!