Mac vs streamer.

Thanks, everyone. I really appreciate your sharing your experiences around this. Here’s another question that’s come up for me: I need to be able to use a remote of some sort with any streamer. I have my iPhone set up to control my computer but I have a small one and the screen is small and it would not be good for trying to control a streamer. Would I need to buy an iPad to have a big enough screen to use as a remote for someone with not particularly good eyesight? Do any of the streamers have really big screens?

My Pro-ject Stream Box can be controlled via an Internet browser with any PC or Mac (laptop or desktop) on the same network as the streamer. This works as well as any iPhone or Android phone. (or iPad). I think many other streamers such as the Bluesound Node have a similar capability. Bluesound requires the Bluesound app for Windows or Mac to do the same thing.

I find that capability to be really useful as I am often controlling the streamer while doing work.

 Thank you so much for that information. It makes the streamer thing much more viable for me in my situation.

Streamers can offer some improvement and people certainly like them but dropping several thousand for a streamer doesn't appear to get the results for the money. People have done these tests and comparisons at high level evaluations before.

Have a high end tube monoblock system and it is very sensitive to changes even one small tube can produce a far greater result than anticipated.

If you have a mac, any mac, it's Audirvana that makes a big difference. At least I can say from personal experience running it on mac laptops and minis, it's very impressive. 

Have been using version 3.5 but Audirvana is out with a relatively new version called Studio. I like version 3.5 so much, I've yet to try Studio. It's that good. 

R: Thanks!