dac and streamer or seperates

Watch Paul’s video on the topic:

https://youtu.be/ARVpOhkyalQ?feature=shared

Good post malbers. I really did not expect Paul to feel this way. Glad to have affirmation for my recent decision. 😀

@russbutton

Theoretically, you are correct. In the real world you are completely wrong. PCs sound terrible in comparison to dedicated streamers… and the better the streamer… the better the sound quality. Like night and day… not at all subtle. 

OP, I’m pretty open minded when it comes to this hobby. I had solid state for 25 years and have recently gone tube amp and preamp. I’ve owned 3 dacs and demoed another and let me say with 100% certainty, BITS ARE NOT JUST BITS. Any simple test and you will quickly see this is not the case. Shop wisely. 

When you rip a CD to disk, you’re copying data off the CD. Do that 10 times and each file copy will cksum exactly the same. If it doesn’t then your data is corrupt. That’s what I mean by bits is bits. Call it a streamer if you like, but it’s still just a computer with a CPU, data bus, I/O ports and an operating system - most likely a Linux varient under the hood.

Data gets copied from one place to another, bit by bit. That’s how computers work. 30 years as a UNIX/Linux IT engineer in Silicon Valley doing mission critical projects is how I made my money. I do rsync backups from California to Hawaii and the data transfer are accurate. Every cksum comparison matches. EVERY one.

So the data leaving my laptop PC being fed to my DAC is precisely the same data being fed by your streamer to your DAC. Bits is bits.

It’s what happens to that data which is what you hear. It’s not until the data is being converted to Analog that there can be a possible difference.