why expensive streamers
@soix and others
I am unclear about the effect on sound of streamers (prior to getting to the dac). Audio (even hi-res) has so little information content relative to the mega and giga bit communication and processing speeds (bandwidth, BW) and cheap buffering supported by modern electronics that it seems that any relatively cheap piece of electronics would never lose an audio bit.
Here is why. Because of the huge amount of BW relative to the BW needs of audio, you can send the same audio chunk 100 times and use a bit checking algorithm (they call this "check sum") to make sure just one of these sets is correct. With this approach you would be assured that the correct bits would be transfered. This high accuracy rate would mean perfect audio bit transfer.
What am I missing? Why are people spending 1000's on streamers?
thx
@8th-note - CD won't necessarily be better. CD transports also have jitter and CD reading may be unreliable. In fact, I think FLAC stream is way more bit-perfect, than a Red Book CD data retrieval. Better comparison would be playback of the same track off USB thumb drive - excludes network issues. |
@mikhailark exactly, a data stream doesn't have any other attributes and qualities, which is why I am still waiting for an explanation, what an expensive streamer does differently than one that "just works"
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@grislybutter - me too since people claim to hear difference. I am open minded. However, I am also a former software engineer and have masters in math, singnal processing.... I can imagine that low end streamer may have weak CPU (like low power ARM) and small RAM, so it may be losing packets and not sending bits over USB in a timely fashion. Another thing that network traffic includes other people in the household watching movies, browsing, playing games. Having network switch isolating this traffic from streamer may be beneficial, if streamer itself is a low performance device. After all, high performance would need fans and most people would not want that. |
@mikhailark right I am not saying there is no room for poor processing, flawed transmission. I just don't get the $1,000 vs $20,000 streamer argument. |
