Any audiophile use computer (MacBook) as your audio streaming source?


I rarely see any audiophile talking about streaming audio digital sources from a computer. I understand MacBook can accept native lossless formats form all the various platforms, and it can store unlimited music files in any format, so supposedly it’s the best source, and the digital file is the most purest before it’s fed to the dac. Anyone compared the sound quality of computer vs other audio streamer? 

randywong

Use your noisy MacBook Pro, no problem. I use a noisy crappy computer too. However, you need a moat in front of your DAC so that the analog noise before the moat does not travel up the USB cable into the DAC.

I use the relatively cheap Sonore OpticalRendu. I ignore Ethernet since Fibre cable sounds better to me. Fibre cable is made from glass and cannot carry the analog noise from the gear before the moat. The fibre cable is the moat. 

Getting fibre into you home system can be done for under $100 via a network switch. Sonore has a complete solution for this, though I only use some of it since I already have network switches with fibre support.

Small Green Computer sells this gear.
SystemOptique Certified – Small Green Computer

If you are a ROON user (RATT protocol), this stuff is easy to do. They also support many other protocols which your Mac likely uses.

Use your noisy MacBook Pro, no problem. I use a noisy crappy computer too. However, you need a moat in front of your DAC so that the analog noise before the moat does not travel up the USB cable into the DAC.

@yyzsantabarbara Out of curiosity, what dedicated streamers have you compared to your computer?

I use Audirvana running on my Apple Laptop Computer 12-Core CPU 19-Core GPU 16GB Unified Memory 1TB SSD Storage.

Audirvana outputs the signal to my Bricasti M21 DAC using an Ethernet cable. The Bricasti M21 is recognized as a DNLA device and becomes a powerful media renderer offering pristine data transmission over long distances, without loss of signal or degradation. My sound quality is excellent.

Oh damned! All your comments just open up a new universe to me. There are a lot of knowledge just surrounding the digital music source and the streamer. I am now using Eversolo a8, which is basically a mini version of android computer, way not comparable to the MacBook Pro. I only use its streaming function since I love my c53’s da2 better, but the sound was fantastic. That’s why I think a MacBook should work better and further improve the sound quality. Seems like I ignored other factors involved. Now my question: I am now using the coaxial to output the digital to dac, should I change it to giga lan or usb (which supposed to be more native to digital signals)?