Simon, what’s your current set-up? If it is very well established, then I wouldn’t expect some miracle performance just because you have removed some moving parts. I have been predominantly streaming for several years but recently reintroduced my CD player. Despite my streaming front end costing much more, it can’t match the CD player for flow(although the player is particularly good for that). If flow isn’t a big concern, then streaming may prove a good option. I don’t have experience with your considerations but if you just want to try the convenience of streaming, they will be a solid start. What is your motivation for trying streaming?

Interesting that the original complaint about CD was that the sampling rate wasn't high enough and now it is claimed that CD is better than hi res streaming ...
Confused ...

Having switched completely from CDs to ripped'n'streamed music (while still playing LPs), I could offer an opinion. It's the internet, so everyone has an opinion, here's mine :-)

I don't think it matters a damn where "the bits" are coming from. Sourced from CD or a streamer, all you want to start with is a reliable source of bits. Now, I was around in the Usenet audio wars of the early 90s, so I am emphatically NOT saying "bits are bits" in the way that it was used back then. But there's certainly an element of that, bits don't have intrinsic magic properties depending on whether they're coming from a streamer or a CD player, they decode to the same old zeros and ones representing a PCM datastream. I know that the late and lovely Alex K would have disagreed with me on that, but there y'go.

What matters very much indeed, by contrast, is the electrical noise that accompanies those bits. Most DAC devices (both chip-based and hair-shirt discrete) are incredibly sensitive to electrical noise, and that can include good old fashioned power supply noise, clock noise, phase noise (AKA jitter) on the bit stream itself, etc, etc, etc. It's a nightmare. It is probably easier for a designer to create a cleanish environment for the DAC when there are no external interfaces (running at data speed, s/he obviously has to have a power supply and an analogue output). Which suggests that a CD player *should* be easier to get clean.

A streaming DAC, by contrast, has a greater range of high-speed interfaces. We're grown-ups, so let's not even think about Wifi, but the average Ethernet port is a nightmare. There's all sorts of perfectly legitimate noise going on there, as well as your bit timing clock there'll be a 4B5B word clock, a packet clock, and so on. Plus loads of random noise injected from everywhere else. I believe that Andrew Everard of this parish runs his last meter over fibre; that'll get rid of lots of conducted electrical noise from upstream, but it won't be a wholly magic bullet as his streamer will still be picking up the self-generated noise from the final optical/electrical converter. Deffo worth a go though; easy [for some values of easy...] to do and should get good benefits. But the designer still has the problem of isolating that Ethernet port within the streamer.

And so it goes on. It's really all about noise. I run a separate streamer and DAC ('cos both are very old, rather than as a specific design choice) but it does at least keep my ethernet away from my DAC, the connection between the two is high speed USB, which is itself a bucket of noise, but I have at least been able to insert full galvanic isolation betwen the two.

Pete

Hi Simon,

I decided to dip my toe into the streaming world last year, but decided it would be fun to try to do it on an extreme budget. My cd player has a digital input so I decided to see what kind of result I could get out of a £35 Chromecast Audio puck fed by my phone. It all started out as low budget fun (if I recall my cabling and power supply cost less than £15!). However, since the Chromecast Audio only has optical out and my cd player only has electrical in, I was forced to use an optical to electrical converter (which, in view of the comments above, may be a good thing), which I then inevitably upgraded when I found something better. It soon became clear that upgrading each part of the power supply and digital signal chain stripped away jitter. I have now spent WAY too much on this mini streamer setup, but it was great fun to construct and it sounds great!

Richard

Hi Richard, firstly welcome to the forums.

Interesting findings and at a very reasonable cost, certainly worth an experiment!!

Simon