SteveR750 said:
CnoEvil said:
Think of a Streamer as a CDP with no moving parts, so in the same way as CDPs sound different and generally improve with price, it's the same with Streamers. Please don't take my word for it, and have a listen to what's out there from Linn, Cyrus, Naim and Yamaha.
And surely therein lies the detail! There is inevitable data loss when reading from a spinning disc, not so when streaming a bit perfect file. I would have thought that any streamer that can present an unmodified data stream to the DAC (bit perfect) *should sound the same. This was the conclusion we reached in my swap the PC for a dedicated streamer thread a while back.
*notwithstanding subjective / psychological human imperfections etc of course!
There are two distinct questions in there:
1. Why do streamers sound (in theory) better than CDPs....and this is as you've stated ie. The problems associated with a spinning disc (eg. error correction in real time and mechanical noise) vs streaming a perfect rip.
2. Why do streamers sound different/better to each other...receiving a perfect stream is the easy bit; what you do with it is the acid test. This is where factors like power supply, effective isolation/screening, the handling of jitter, the quality of the Dac and the effectiveness of the up-sampling, have a big effect.
The reason I keep recommending Linn, is they are the best that I've personally heard, and as you go up the food chain from Sneaky -> Majik -> Akurate -> Klimax, the differences are there to be heard; but the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and it comes down to what one is personally prepared to pay for the improvement.
When Linn brought out the Dynamik (switch mode) power supply, it made a very noticeable difference (imo bringing the Majik DS up to the level of the Akurate DS that hadn't got one fitted).