why expensive streamers

noise is easy to measure, which is why I find it extraordinary when high $ streamers are advertised as lowering noise without any measurements/data to back it up.  However, there are a few places where some analysis of the differences - or lack thereof - across different streamers - is done more comprehensively.  These include hifinews (paul miller’s measurements sections of streamer reviews), archimago, goldensound, and, yes, ASR.  (For a reaction to the point from @blisshifi, see Amir’s video entitled “Is digital transmission really analog?”)

grislybutter

I would have thought when analog is converted to digital and it becomes a stream, timing is encoded in the stream, the 0s and 1s. There is no layers of data, such as content and "pace" or whatever timing means, it's all one linear series.

Oh no, "streaming" is a misnomer in that sense. It isn't linear at all. The data arrive in packets and they can arrive out of sequence, and perhaps even multiple times if errors are detected.

@cleeds 

I meant stream = the end result, the sum of the packets, glued back together. The serialized data. What I know from writing code for reading data from e.g., text to binary and back. But in short I have no idea. I should read up on it before asking questions. 

In addition to what others have said, there is a difference between streaming and data transfer via a bit perfect FTP.  Banking, nuclear weapons, government records, etc can't tolerate dropped bits.  they can't just guess what it should have been via interpolation.  So they use a checking program and will not terminate the file transfer until it is 100% verified.  That is why in the early days of the internet it took forever to download files and sometimes they would fail because they couldn't get to 100%. 

You don't have the luxury of this for streaming.  thus dropped bits are estimated by the streamer and the music must go on.  Thus we do everything we can to prevent dropped bits.  And it is quite audible.

Jerry

 @cleeds Quite possibly but if ethernet protocols didn’t sort this then the internet wouldn’t work. Error checking and correction are built in. The streamer input side deals with this so the output side doesn’t have to.