Old phones as streaming sources

Hey @soix unlike some others on this forum I don't hold myself out as a self-annointed expert. I am merely a thinking human who likes audio gear and music. That exactly why I share my limitations. Younger folks may hear things quite differently, but ironicaly from what I can tell, they mostly are happy with much more modest gear. How old are you and how is your hearing?

As for streamers I own or have owned they would include a Pi, an Auralic Aries, a Yamaha WXC-50, and an OktoResearch Dac8 and of course a couple of computers and iphones. Think I mentioned some of these earlier in the thread.

Hey @soix unlike some others on this forum I don't hold myself out as a self-annointed expert.

I’m not a self-anointed expert, but it’s pretty clear if you listen to people here who have better streamers from the likes of Aurender, Grimm, Innuos, etc. that streamers matter and the iPhone is not a great streamer — in fact it pretty much sucks IME.  It’s functional but so is a Toyota Corolla — doesn’t make it a great car.  The iPhone is a functional streamer and trying to elevate it past that is just silly talk.  You can’t hear past 11kHz so not surprised you can’t hear the difference, but that’s you and not most of us.  

I don’t know. but it seems to me that in order to be so definitive about a position, it would seem incumbent on the person arguing that position to cite something other than “people who have better streamers”, particularly in light of the science and measurements of some credible audio professionals that support the OP’s position.  And I commend the OP for his much more humble approach here, and for acknowledging out loud what virtually every male over 50 years of age - most of us on this forum lol! - are experiencing.  Michael Fremer did a rather courageous review a couple years ago of hearing aids.  

particularly in light of the science and measurements of some credible audio professionals that support the OP’s position. 

And who would that be?

From an earlier in this post, I said …” I have streamed from about every device you can think of.” Let me go into a bit more detail.

I have owned / used extensively in my systems: iPods, iPhones, iPads, several MACs, PCs (some optimized by shutting down processes, heavily conditioned power source, using different CODEX and software, sound cards, etc), several DAPs (including my $3.5K one), And many dedicated streamers including, Aurlic Aries G2, Aurrender N100, N10, N20, and my current W20SE ($22K), Linn, Grimm MU1, Lina… and I am sure I sure I have forgotten a few.

The streamer is a critical component in sound quality of a digital system… and iPhones, iPads, Macs and the like sound pretty good, but are simply not in the same league as dedicated streamers. The gap is big at the low end and simply gets bigger and bigger as one moves up the quality level of the streamers / systems.

I have found that Aurender are at the top of the class at every level of expenditure and each level up affords a substantial improvement in sound quality over the last. I climbed slowly to this level, where my system is today, over a period of twenty years. My current digital end being equal in sound quality to my really good analog end.

A friend of mine mentioned that Aurender said somewhere in their literature that the streamer accounts for 70% of the sound quality of a system vs 30% DAC. While this kind of thing is not analytical… but intended to convey the importance. The problem is, you can’t use a low end DAC and a high end streamer, this is the first thing someone will counter with. But if you are talking high end components in roughly the same class… so say a Berkely Alpha 3 DAC and a Aurrender N20… the component that is vastly controlling the sound quality is the streamer.