USB Cable

@soix ​​, @ghdprentice 

+2

yep …. They DO walk among us .

Inakustik USB is my favorite so far. 

I'm thinking of going on Rennlist, 992forum, 911uk.com and posting:

"Please don't spend high $ for a Porsche. Well made cheap Honda's work the same!" 

I honestly do not know, you can start a new thread and conduct a poll. Million dollar or inexpensive music streamer/server…they all have a processor at heart. The premise here is, a general purpose PC is not optimized or optimal for audio streaming. You can add fiber or filters as alluded by @antigrunge2 ahead of a DAC to reduce noise but a general purpose PC will never sound as good as dedicated streamer designed specifically to stream audio. Fortunately, there are plenty of decent choices out there at all price points.

What is a computer or streamer doing? It gets the bits from one end to the other. If it is using a guaranteed network delivery protocol, then we are not losing bits.

So, all streamers should sound the same, no they do not. The streamer device connected to the DAC does add some sonic flavor to the sound. However, my argument is that the optimization of a computer for streaming is doing a couple of things. It is lowering the noisy internals found in a computer and it is adding some flavor to this clean sound.

In my case, I say spending on an optimized streamer to reduce noise is an expensive way to this. A simple fibre optic cable just before the DAC (which is all that matters) will also kill the noise. A simple test with Ethernet vs Fibre on most DACs will show the difference. Now adding an expensive streamer after the Ethernet input and then output AES, USB, et al into the DAC should be as clean as the fibre I advocate for.

You spend much more money to do this but gain some convenience. That convenience will be very important for most, but I am very comfortable with this type of things.

I recently had 3 streamers that got the stream from a cheap DELL computer (placed in another room) that I compared side by side and they sounded different. This is the cream of the crop streamers:

• Sonore OpticalRendu
• Lumin X1 (sold it)
• PlayBack Designs Streamer-IF

The sound was great on all. The Lumin was louder, the Sonore was quieter, and the PBD was shocking to me. I have not been able to use the PBD with fibre yet because I do not have the PlayBack Designs Dream DAC yet.

I have been using the PDB with a Benchmark DAC3B via SPDIF input. That also sounds great. What I think is happening is that there must be some fibre inside the PBD streamer. The guy who makes the PDB is considered a digital genius. Using fibre would be a genius move.

PDB designs has now come out with a very expensive streamer. Let’s assume I am mega rich and can afford it. I would not buy it over the demo $2K Streamer-IF I now own,

@yyzsantabarbara streaming is not bit perfect.  File transfer is.  but music can't use bit perfect FTP.