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

@randywong I used Mac mini for streaming using Roon and it couldn’t compete with a dedicated streamer. Lumin U1 Mini easily beat it. Yes streamers are computers but they’re designed for streaming and are optimized for it (lower jitter/noise).

As to the interface between streamer and DAC, when you use coax or AES, the clock in the streamer is critical. When you use USB, the clock in the DAC is what you’re relying on. In majority of cases with lower end streamers the USB is what the design is focused around and you would typically end up with better performance using the USB interface. Only way to know is to try. Get a nice USB cable and give it a try with the Eversolo. 
One other aspect of your streaming chain to consider is the C53 inbuilt DAC. You can improve on it with a good external DAC. 

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

@soix The streamers that I used ALL used my computer so I cannot answer that. These are the streamers I owned.

• Lumin X1
• PlayBack Designs STREAM-IF
• Sonore OpticalRendu
• Sonore microRendu
• Direct USB into a DAC from a computer (a decade ago)

All of the above except the direct computer to the DAC used the ROON RATT protocol. My $500 DELL PC running ROON CORE (without monitor | keyboard | mouse) is under a bed in my guest bedroom connected to my home network by Ethernet (RJ45).

My computer automatically starts up at 7AM and shuts down at 2:30AM. In the rare case I need to get into the Windows OS, I just RDP in.

I do not care about the quality or noise on this computer because of my ’moat’ before the DAC.

If you look at how digital genius Andreas Koch designed the PBD STREAM-IF I would think it was meant for my scenario. The STREAM-IF uses a proprietary Plink connection which is essentially Fibre cable. That unit actually takes RJ45 as the input stream (or USB from a computer) but has the fibre inside to kill the noise.

I never spent money on a silent computer for my audio system, oops I mean an audiophile music server. I have recently heard an expensive $20K music server at a demo for a very expensive system. I preferred my system at home, but I think that was more a reflection of my speakers just being better.

I used to use a Mac for streaming. However your limited not only with sound quality, but digitally. I think the most I got out of my Mac was 96khz 24bit. Dedicated streamer/dac will go 256, 512 and dsd files.So soix has it right.

I use my old engineering ThinkPad P50 Xeon with Foobar2000 and an old Topping E30 to feed a Denon X4200W and Revel F208

You can use a computer but a good streamer with a dedicated LPS power supply ,and upgrade the signal using a ddc or reclocker ,this too applies to streamers  it takes the digital signal ,holds it in a buffer then uses a much higher grade clock and filtering to create a much more pristine signal to your dac ,,

another added benefit is that you can run the best audio signal I2S  cable from the reclocker. online they now have pretty decent USB to I2S converters if you just want to run it into your dac, depending just how good your dac cleans the incoming signal. for even the little linear power supply in your streamer cannot match what a good DDC can do .  In mine I took it up a notch, and went from Femto clocks 

to precision. dual Oven clocks ⏰,plus a lot of filtering , and isolation using I2S Cable from DDC to the dac ,a Big difference in musicality for just over $1k , if you have  a more moderate system around $550 for a decent one ,,buy a respectable cable ,they look like a hdmi cables, Wireworld  work well nothing under $70 like the Sphere ,or Silver Sphere around $270 , to me. A worth wild option , you can spend $10k on a ddc but that is overkill IMO,That being said ,I have heard $100k digital setups ,for people with Ultra budgets . Way out of my league even when I owned a Audio store.