I am back to square 1. (I told you I was slow, thick and now also silly)
With bit-perfect data transfer music providers, what does an expensive streamer does better than a basic one? Is it the data that it sends to the DAC?
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
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Not sure what your dac is, but any differences you hear may have to do with different processing. The N150 definitely reclocks, for example. In addition, if the n150 is upsampling, but the Node isn’t, you’ll definitely hear a difference. May not matter to you, since you like it better, but for purposes of lessons learned, it’s important to filter out (pun intended) any differences in processing going on. |
I too appreciate the wife-was-stunned-by-the-diff factor. But if it’s after a spouse was known to be fidgeting with kit, that’s just another likely expression of bias. Clever Hans was an instructive fellow. No one seems to have an answer as to why data centers aren’t meaningful sources of perceptible signal degradation for music streaming services. Are all data centers imagined to be of equivalent quality and capability in a world where one streamer company can engineer several tiered devices that make sound remarkably different on the other end of the chain, based on whatever departs any given data center worldwide?
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@mdalton I understand what you are saying. I don’t have all the answers. My bias was that the N150 would sound the same for all the reasons expressed and that was my technical opinion as well. Beyond that I did not want to spend the extra money for the N150. I liked my node and its software. In spite of that, it sounded better. If it is the different processing that occurs, that processing is part of the product that sounds better so I am keeping the one that sounds better. Maybe I could have bought a $2000 streamer that sounded just as good, but you would still say I got fleeced. Not sure where to draw the line between a fair price and fleecing. I think the Wiim can be had for $100. The extra cost also goes to product reliability, personal support services, software updates, and additional features. I find these aspects valuable. I wish there was more technical research on this topic because streamers sound different and if we knew why, then that knowledge might lead to other improvements. What has been your experience when comparing streamers like the Node to something in the Aurender lineup? |
The only Bluesound product I have is their Powernode, which drives my outdoor speakers on the deck; I’m using the internal DAC cuz it’s obviously about as far as you can get from a critical listening environment. The Aurenders I’ve heard, because they’re ubiquitous these days, are all in dealer or show conditions, and have never been in A/B situations. My A/B experience is among my current crop of streamers, which include a Raspberry Pi, an iFi Zen, a Pro-Ject Streambox S2 Ultra, and the streamer portion of my Gold Note DS10. My experience is consistent with what the data and theory tell me, which is that I hear no difference between a $150 streamer and a $1000 streamer, with my DACs. At the high end, I spent an afternoon with a friend at a dealer comparing an Innuos Pulsar ($8000) to the streaming portion of a Simaudio 280D streaming dac ($3900), with a DCS dac. No difference. (This experiment was for my friend’s benefit, as he wanted to get comfortable with replacing his DCS with one of the new Simaudio North products - he chose the top of the line 891 - $25k!!) All of this is consistent with the lab measurements that paul miller at hifi news has been doing on streamers. I’ve put together a spreadsheet (sorry, I’m a recently retired finance guy) summarizing his results for a bunch of products, including Volumio Rivo (£1k), Aurender N200 (£7k), Melco N20 (£7k), Grimm MU1 (£10k), Aurender N30SA (£24k), and an Antipodes Oladra (£25k). He compared the SNR and jitter results from these streamers in conjunction with 3 different DACs - AQ Dragonfly, iFi Neo iDSD, and a Mytek Brooklyn (i.e., from really cheap to moderate price, but nothing expensive). His findings? Jitter measurements for the $200 Dragonfly ranged from 105 psec to 150 psec, with the highest number coming from the Aurender N200. Fear not though. Remember, a psec = 1/1000 nsec, and the general rule is that we can’t detect jitter unless it’s about 30 nsec, which is 30,000 psec! What about the iFi and the Mytek? Even better jitter rejection, with ranges of 9-18 psec and 5-10 psec, respectively. And the results on SNR tests were similar. There, the only material noise issue was with the Dragonfly. In summary, the science, my experience, and actual measurements tell me the same thing. A competent streamer should not be a source of audible noise; I am convinced that any differences we hear are either due to differences in signal processing (e.g., reclocking, up sampling, etc.), our DACs, or, yes, confirmation bias. I also believe that most of the niche companies in the streamer space like to bundle their products - server, streamer, dac - because then it’s awfully difficult to pinpoint where that great sound you’re hearing is coming from. I hope this is helpful. I’d be happy to give a better, more comprehensive summary of the hifi news methodology, but in the interest of brevity (lol!!)….
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- 191 posts total