To the OP: As you can see, there are some on this forum whose beliefs/experiences suggest that you need to spend a material portion of your budget - relative to your DAC - on the streamer. There are others, like me, whose beliefs/experiences suggest that if you spend more than a relatively small amount of $ (i.e., $250 to $2,000?) on a streamer, you may be spending money on features that have nothing to do with sound quality.
In my experience, most of those who argue for substantial expenditures on streamers point to lower noise as the explanation for differences they claim to hear (if they offer an explanation at all), because that can be the only explanation! And sometimes they cite manufacturer marketing materials promising “decreased jitter and noise”.
But here’s the rub. Noise, particularly in the digital domain, is pretty easy to measure. And yet there’s this weird cognitive dissonance among some when confronted with actual measurements of noise. They claim you can’t measure it, accuse others of being Luddites for incorporating actual science and data into their decision-making process, resort to name-calling (I mean, I’ve even been called an “Alvin” for god’s sake, lol!), etc.
Let’s take jitter, for example. The issue is not whether there’s no jitter, it’s whether there’s a substantial difference in jitter across streamers, how much jitter we’re talking about, and the extent to which different DACs reject jitter from streamers.
In my research, I have found the “lab report” section of HiFi News streamer reviews incredibly insightful. For exposition, I’ve looked at the results from 11 different streamer reviews over about 4 years, with prices ranging from £1,000 to £33,000; in 5 of them they use a usb connection to a computer as their control scenario vs. the streamer, and then they use up to 3 different DACs with both the computer and the streamer. All 11 of the reviews I’ve pulled feature the Mytek Brooklyn dac, 6 include the iFi Neo iDSD, and 4 include the AQ Dragonfly. Here are some takeaways:
1) The Mytek has low jitter levels itself, and also is very effective at rejecting any streamer-induced jitter;
2) The iFi is a low jitter DAC, but is not nearly as effective at rejecting streamer-induced jitter; and
3) The amount of jitter produced by all 11 of the streamers is very low, and doesn’t vary materially by price.
How did I arrive at these conclusions? Here are several snippets of the data:
- the single highest jitter number, 550 psec, was with the computer/iFi combo, substantially more than the computer/Dragonfly number (300 psec).
- but, when paired with a decent streamer (e.g., the Volumio Rivo or Aurender N200), the iFi’s jitter amount was substantially less than the Dragonfly (18 & 9 psec v. 150 & 135 psec, respectively.
- the Mytek’s jitter levels were never above 10 psec, whether using the computer or any one of the 11 streamers.
That’s why even a Raspberry Pi can sound really good; many DACs, even moderately priced, do a very good job of rejecting jitter - and other sources of noise - from a streamer. But there are decent DACs, in this case the iFi, that may not be engineered to reject jitter from a streamer. So, to be safe, you can invest a little more than $150 and get a very low-jitter streamer.
And finally, I am most certainly not a welcome visitor to ASR and Amir. After all, I use tube amps and spin vinyl, two technologies that Amir sh_ts on as from the fricking Middle Ages.
I hope this is helpful.
