A/B Comparison On A Pair Of Moderately Priced Streamers

I have posted this before and will do it again. I a/b’d the Bluesound Node2 against an Aurender N100 through the same DAC (at the time the Hegel 190).. I wanted to like the Aurender better because I could get a great deal. After two hours of patient listening I could detect NO difference. And the cheaper Node has a far better user interface that you don’t have to pay for. Of course I still wonder because we are all searching for the holy grail of sound, but so far all I hear is conflicting gobbledegook about which four figure streamer sounds better. I have since upgraded my DAC and that did make a difference as did the upgraded LPS. Adjusting the time clock on the Node was a nice tweak. All of this being said my perception is that higher end streamers do not seem to make any difference. Folks need to do an apples to apples a/b and send out their results 

Would be best though if iFi would update their devices to work better on Wi-Fi in the first place, since that functionality is part of their marketing to consumers

@moonwatcher   Amen brother, I’m right there with ya.  And I’ll add their complete lack of customer service is downright unforgivable.  But, at $399 and the sound quality/$ I was willing to do a workaround rather than punting it off my roof in anger and disgust.  But if it gives me any trouble with the extender I’m hitting the roof immediately. 

I agree with the statement that quality of your DAC is far more important than your streamer. After all streamer just sends bits. In my opinion, buying an expensive streamer with internal DAC and using only that device is a mistake because external R2R DACs are far more superior. In my experience I bought relatively inexpensive Bluesound Node streamer and connected to Denafrips Terminator Plus DAC. I think despite price of that combo is very is very similar to Lumin or Aurender, sound is far superior to streamer DAC combo. 

I agree with the statement that the quality of your DAC is far more important than your streamer.  After all streamer just sends bits.
 

@drbay Due respect I couldn’t disagree more.  Streamers are instrumental to minimizing noise among other things — the arch enemy of good quality streaming.  You’ve got an awesome DAC, and if you think the Node is on the same plane as Lumin, Aurender, Innuos, Aries, etc. I think you’re sorely underestimating the role of a streamer.  I’d highly encourage you to try one of these better streamers in your system and see what you think, because IMHO you’re leaving a lot of performance on the table.  Just my $0.02 FWIW. 

This is so common an issue. One component is really critical until it at or above the rest of your system… then it is not. If you have a low quality DAC… then, upgrading makes a huge difference. Then, if you upgrade the streamer… OMG, what a difference. 
 

I do not want to take anything away from @soix. He is right. The streamer is critical, unless your DAC I’d the bottleneck.