Erik/Nigel, I don’t think most of the respondents got your point, or perhaps, they don’t agree with it. Increased buffering capacity is not an expensive, exotic feature on a streamer, yet the respondents above are mentioning some of the most expensive streamers on the market. Most seem to be clean to their gadgets as well. or, perhaps, I am misreading it.
It's your streamer, not your modem
So many discussions I've seen lately have been about upgrading Internet devices, especially the modems and routers to get the best possible audio. Audiogoners are talking about installing 10 GigE (10 Gigabits per second) cable for signals that barely need 10 megabits per second. Three full orders of magnitude more bandwidth than required by hi resolution audio. (192 k/24 bit)
I've also seen discussions about home Internet getting a little higher latency and jitter.
None of this should matter with a decent streamer. Let me give you an example. Because my work requires me to be online with high reliability I have two different Internet providers and a switch that detects failure in one and switches me to another.
It takes the switch approximately 40 seconds to detect the Internet is down and fail over to the other. 40 seconds. 40,000 milliseconds. For this testing I shut the modem off. In that moment, for the next 40 seconds, I had no working Internet. Then my back-up 5G Internet took over. About 3 minutes after that my primary Internet's modem has rebooted and my router has recognized it as available and switched back over.
During the testing I coincidentally had Roon playing a random Jazz selection.
Not once did my audio stop. Not even a hiccup.
Why? Buffering. Roon had gotten the entire song and doled it out to my end point a little at a time.
Point is, modem quality, router quality, switches, and Ethernet cables don't matter that much. What does is the size of the buffer and the effectiveness of the anti-jitter circuitry in the DAC.
I do by the way recommend shielded cables, Ethernet isolators and gas discharge surge protectors, but sweat a modem or router? Not me.
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@bruce19 I see your point. To be clear, I'm not advocating for a more expensive streamer, just streamers with better buffers, and honestly I have no idea who they are. It's not a specification I often see published or mentioned in reviews. Dollar for dollar, room treatment is much more important than an Ethernet switch. Is streamer A for $4,000 better than streamer B at $1,000 for managing Internet weather? I have no idea. In many other areas I've seen exorbitant prices without any guarantee of better performance. One example is galvanic isolation of USB ports. It should be standard today but it isn't, even on expensive streamers. Sometimes they have it and sometimes they don't. |
I'm doing eveything wrong. I stream through my Asus ROG laptop computer which is connected to my network through wifi. I hook up the laptop to my Berkeley Alpha USB/Alpha Reference DAC Series 2 MQA, via cheap USB cable. When I play a Qobuz file and I'm careful to play the same version as a CD I own, the sound is identical to the CD played through my Jay's CD 3 Mk III into my Berkeley DAC. When people implement all this esoteric stuff to their digital infrastructure, do they ever compare the sound to a CD? Does anybody ever get to the point where streamed music sounds better than the same song/version played from a CD? How bad did the streamed music sound to begin with? I don't see how a streamed file with all of the complicating issues that have been described in this thread can ever sound better than the same file played from a CD through a good quality transport into the same DAC. I don't get it. |
@erik_squires I guess buffering could be done either on the music server, or the streamer itself. For instance, I have an M1 Mac mini that serves as my roon hub, and it delivers the stream to various endpoints on my home network. I suppose it might be possible, even probable that the endpoints have some degree of buffering built into them. My hunch is that they do. But you’re right I never see this mentioned or discussed in tech specs. I would guess that buffering at the endpoint is not as critical as where the stream comes into the home, but that could be a legitimate point of discussion. |
Well, certainly not wrong in my book! As a previous apartment dweller, I know how bad Wifi signals can be in a densely populated apartment building, but in a home with sparse neighbors it's perfectly serviceable. There are always two things I worry about when using a PC or laptop as the source:
If those two issues are mitigated I think they're perfectly fine. One way to test for this with a laptop is to let your laptop discharge to around 50% and then plug your power supply into the AC. See if you hear any noticeable difference in playback quality. To prevent these issues I keep any computers outside of the clean side of power conditioners and use a USB isolator. The further away your PC is from the stereo, the more important a USB isolator becomes, as ground loops are more likely to occur. Otherwise, I never bother getting very esoteric. |
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