@lanx0003 What you fail to recognize is that noise is the mortal enemy of good streaming, and an iPhone is about the noisiest source possible for streaming. Streamers go to great lengths to minimize noise while the iPhone does nothing in that regard and has tons of electronics — as well as being a phone — running as it’s streaming music. No bueno. I started streaming with an iPhone and it’s fine but it’s absolute crap relative to a decent streamer. It’s a Jack of all trades and master of nothing, especially when it comes to audio.
Old phones as streaming sources
I'm curious how many of you have converted old phones to streamers. I have found that when I remove the sim card and shut off blue tooth and wire the phone to a dac with an appropriate USB adapter cable, my old iphone 6s makes a pretty good streamer. Just wondering what others experiance has been. It is a really economical way to source digital to a 2nd or 3rd system. You can even cut electronic noise further by running on battery power when listening and shutting off the screen once the music is rolling. Going one step further would be to transfer local files to the phones memory and turn off wireless altogether. I have not done this but theoretically it should help. I usually just run the Qobuz app and stream from that to my Chord Mojo. What's your experiance?
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@mdalton By that logic you can feed a $10k DAC with an iPhone and be no better off if you use a good Aurender, Grimm, Innuos, etc. streamer. Is that your contention? I don’t think there are many people here with good DACs who would use an iPhone as a streaming source. I did, and it sucked and would assume most others would find the same. But hey, if an iPhone works for you then rock on dude. |
I didn’t actually make such a blanket statement, no. I can imagine there are $10k DACs that do a poor job of cleaning up noise on the incoming digital signal, in which case I would definitely recommend a well-engineered, noise-free streamer (though I would never recommend an Aurender or its ilk as I think they are dramatically overpriced for what you get). In your case, you have a Denafrips ddc which cleans everything up before your NOS dac, which makes a lot of sense. You also didn’t spend a bunch on a streamer, opting for the zen, which seems smart to me (I have one in one of my systems too btw). But frankly, you could prob go even cheaper - e.g. RPi) if you wanted - I did that exact experiment. Finally, I would note, as discussed in another thread, that Benchmark, who makes some of the quietest, most resolving DACs and amps extent, have said that streamers don’t make a difference with their DACs. Re rocking on, I’m more of a jazz dude, but I appreciate the sentiment.
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@mdalton Yeah, that’s just absurd IMHO.
Yeah, I didn’t but even without the DDC I heard a huge improvement over an iPhone/iPad. Hey, but if you think an iPhone is a great streamer then you do you. If you can’t hear the difference I feel pretty sorry for you. |
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