27-Feb-2015, 13:06
(27-Feb-2015, 09:42)Womaz Wrote: Thanks for the replies guys. A lot of what you say i understand and I know why people chose a dedicated streamer over say a PC.
What I dont get is if the DAC is really where the sound quality comes from then why would someone pay say £2500 fir the Aurender N100 streamer. Are you saying that the streamer can make that much difference to the SQ.? Surely the quality of the DAC is the critical thing and the streamer fairly insignificant. By the way I am not arguing either way as I dont know, but this is something I have been unable to get my head round lately.
I can answer this one as well! I have a mid price Pioneer Bluray player. Now this does include streamer functionality. A while back I set it up with lots of songs on a hard drive and did back to back trials vs AIR Ethernet. Why should it not sound as good, bits are bits? I was actually optimistic that it would sound ok. It didn't! Nominally it sounded ok, but there was a loss of detail, the biggest issue was with bass. With AIR the bass was razor sharp and accurate, with my ultra low budget streamer, the bass was flabby. To be frank, it did not get anywhere near to AIR. So yes, the front end matters. Clocking ability, cleanness of the digital feed and a few other subtle issues matter a lot.
