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

@mitch2 Thank you for helping recenter and focus this thread with your excellent post, thorough and thoughtful like your ongoing DAC review series which I also follow.

Digital audio nomenclature is understood and used pretty loosely, resulting in reasonable people talking past each other when in fact they're talking about different things. Sometimes what's left out of an exchange matters as much as what's being said. Imagine two people arguing online about, I don't know, the fit of a pair of jeans. One says they're great, the other says they're horrible. One weighs 140 lbs, the other 280 lbs but neither ever says so.

Unfortunately, when it's like that, observers don't gain anything from the exchange besides confusion.

There really shouldn't be any confusion about these devices, every computer or purpose built audiophile computer I'm aware of is in fact a streamer or at least has streamer capabilities. Coupling these devices to a dedicated streamer ONLY device is what makes them servers. Streamer only devices also go by the name of endpoints, sometimes also called renderers . These devices don't have the capability of acting as servers since they don't have the computing power to process complex music player apps. Streamer only devices are also in fact computers, just optimized and simplified to run a simpler task of acting as endpoints.

There is a lot of confusion about streamers on this thread. The post by @mitch2 is one of the best at clearing the confusion. He is doing the same streaming thing as me except he has a DDC in the chain. I was considering adding one myself solely to have 2 DACs connected from the same endpoint, however, that need is now gone with my next office setup. I will be using Toslink directly out of the computer for my computer audio needs in my office. I just want to hear sound in the Toslink case not care too much about the quality.

My ROON core is still far away in another room on another computer.

BTW - my friend, for whom, I setup the same fiber based streaming setup as mine but using 100 feet of fibre cable for his shop/warehouse, is coming out with an open baffle speaker around December. It will be my new office desktop speaker (I will use stands). Photos at 11.

I have not contacted Mike Moffet via Head-fi web site to ask why he does not use a clock, but I do not have any concerns about Schitt DACs supporting a clock.

@yyzsantabarbara

dCS:

"In a dCS system, the DAC can act as the system master clock, but listening tests have shown that there is no substitute for a dedicated high quality master clock. dCS pioneered the use of external clocks in digital audio systems and this clocking technology has been continually refined so that our latest multi-stage Phase-Locked-Loop (PLL) system sets world-beating standards for accuracy and control of troublesome jitter from the incoming audio stream.

MSB:
"Why are external clocks sub-optimal for digital audio?

A clock signal is a fast moving precision electrical signal and is extremely sensitive to added noise or distortion. Each time it’s buffered or transmitted, a portion of its precision is lost. Even if a small amount of noise couples into the clocks, jitter will increase dramatically. It might still be an accurate clock, but accuracy is of little performance benefit to digital audio. A clock sent over an ultra-high quality cable will still increase its jitter considerably. The best solution is to create the lowest jitter clock as close to the DAC as possible.

You could figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s trying to sell more goofboxes and wires...

M. Moffat + J. Stoddard know their stuff and happen to make honest things. No goofboxes and wires will be peddled by them.

For the record, i have a hermes + venus catching dust in one rig...waiting for a good believer's home. What tad and technics are able to achieve with 1 box (how about throwing a top notch sacd player in it too, if you like)....some others need 15 different boxes and wires to screw things up, it seems.