why expensive streamers

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.

@grislybutter Cool, glad to help. The signal coming out of the streamer containing 1s and 0s does incorporate a timing element. Jitter is therefore a “thing” from the streamer onwards in a way it isn’t up to that point.

@steakster I’m really not sure that’s “as I wish”; I’m a listening first guy who then seeks to understand the physics/science which might explain what I’m hearing but the SR stuff is from a different planet. What the heck are “contouring” and “tuning” actually supposed to be doing to a digital signal? Modifying the 1s and 0s which amounts to corrupting the data? Changing the timing? Or modifying the way in which RFI noise accompanying the digital signal is handled? This sounds like leading edge witchcraft…

Many aspects of music perception are not measurable. But when it comes to altering electrical properties in any way, there should be something the designer used to decide how to alter the electrons that is subject to measurements. If claims are made based on electrical engineering, the engineer should be able to describe the electrical changes and why it improves sound quality, even in a theoretical way. I can decide for myself, by listening, whether I like the change but I don't accept that something meaningful is happening without a reasonable scientific explanation. I believe in the mysteries of music perception but not electrical magic. Give me some kind of science.