lalitk
4,974 posts
The evidence is in the pudding. Try yourself and you may be in for a pleasant surprise. The $6K (N200) and $12K (N20) are not for everyone…OP asked for opinion between the two and the members with direct experience chimed in.
If I may, why ask for properly demoed evidence from members here than trying the two aforementioned streamers in your system? IMHO, If you’re happy with raspberry pi and don’t have any inclination to try a streamer like N200 in your system then no amount of empirical evidence would convince you or anyone. Plenty of users here are quite content with using their laptops as a source for streaming.
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@lalitk I don’t want to digress from the purpose of this thread, but I want to acknowledge your thoughtful comments.
I did have one or two Aurender units through my system some time back along with several other streamers - I’d need to rummage out my notes (literally) to recall model(s). Not a proper double-blind test or prolonged exposure, rather just for fun of the units’ owners who wanted to compare on bigger speakers in a “bigger” room. I turned a blind eye to the swapping processes and couldn’t track predictable differences. People (including myself) can usually perceive differences when switching equipment in the chain, but prior experience suggests to me it’s rarer for those differences to be predictable if confounding factors are properly controlled for.
Be that as it may, I surely wasn’t having guests over to rain on their parade - they seemed to have fun. I would still be curious about any properly designed comparison of streamer units. You’re probably correct in the assumption it wouldn’t make me want to spend 4 figs for a single-task computer with a small company-dependent OS, but that wouldn’t make it any less enlightening, and would certainly be useful to those actually interested in such purchases.
When all this is discussed openly as personal opinion (as you clearly did) I see no issue. Thank you.