Does anyone understand the need for all of these digital components?

[caesar]

Does anyone understand the need for all of these digital components, that a reviewer is using? What are they all for? Are all needed? And how do they benefit the streaming setup?

1. dcs DAC and Innuos Statement Next-Gen Music Server - obvious
2. Small Green Computer Sonore Deluxe opticalModule - why optical module? what is wrong with innous?
3. Uptone Audio EtherREGEN with SOtM sCLK-OCX10 Master Clock and sPS-500 power supply - what the heck is this? and why add clock and power supply?

4. Finisar FTLF8519P3BNL and Broadcom/Avago AFBR-5718PZ 1GB SX-SFP, Gen 5 fiberoptic modules - -what the heck is this? and why?

5. Nordost QNet switch and QSource linear power supplies (2); why add switch when he's got all the other stuff? and why power supplies for the switch?

6. Sonore Audiophile Linear Power Supply - why another power supply? for which component?

7. Synology 5-bay 1019+ NAS with Ferrum Hypsos linear/switching hybrid power supply - what does the power supply add here?

8. Linksys MR9000 mesh router and Arris modem - what is this router? and why is there a modem with the router?

9. Apple 2023 iPad Pro and 2017 MacBook Pro laptop with 2.8GHz Intel i7, SSD, 16GB RAM - such an old apple macbook is good enough, considering the guys has so many other components? is it better than more recent alternatives or did he run out of money?

Wow! and people give vinyl guys a hard time for being obsessive!

 

[PYP]

Does anyone understand the need for all of these digital components, that a reviewer is using? What are they all for? Are all needed? And how do they benefit the streaming setup?

1. dcs DAC and Innuos Statement Next-Gen Music Server - obvious
2. Small Green Computer Sonore Deluxe opticalModule - why optical module? what is wrong with innous?
3. Uptone Audio EtherREGEN with SOtM sCLK-OCX10 Master Clock and sPS-500 power supply - what the heck is this? and why add clock and power supply?

4. Finisar FTLF8519P3BNL and Broadcom/Avago AFBR-5718PZ 1GB SX-SFP, Gen 5 fiberoptic modules - -what the heck is this? and why?

5. Nordost QNet switch and QSource linear power supplies (2); why add switch when he's got all the other stuff? and why power supplies for the switch?

6. Sonore Audiophile Linear Power Supply - why another power supply? for which component?

7. Synology 5-bay 1019+ NAS with Ferrum Hypsos linear/switching hybrid power supply - what does the power supply add here?

8. Linksys MR9000 mesh router and Arris modem - what is this router? and why is there a modem with the router?

9. Apple 2023 iPad Pro and 2017 MacBook Pro laptop with 2.8GHz Intel i7, SSD, 16GB RAM - such an old apple macbook is good enough, considering the guys has so many other components? is it better than more recent alternatives or did he run out of money?

Wow! and people give vinyl guys a hard time for being obsessive!

Some people enjoy going down the rabbit whole. While I was a bit less obsessive, experimenting was educational. I may be oversimplifying, but once I tried a Grimm MU1 streamer, a lot of little boxes (including clock, switches, optical, LPSs for each) went to better homes. In essence, the MU1 is more immune to noise delivered via copper ethernet and from the power source. And every device, including LPS, has their own sound. Pretty soon, it is difficult to determine which components are dominating the sound signature. When that happens, it is a good time to start removing gear and listen.

Now, with the Grimm MU2, which consolidates their streamer/upsampler with their newly designed DAC and therefore eliminates the usual external cable/interface between streamer and DAC, I have found a simple solution that is very musically satisfying. But that is just one path and all the others are valid too, of course.

For me, the things that make this hobby less enjoyable are the audio myths and audio dogma. Folks will state myths/dogma as fact. It is best to empirically test our assumptions.

 

[hopkins]

I went down this rabbit hole myself for a few years - tweaking digital in all sorts of ways, with some off the shelf products and some DIY. Retrospectively, it was fun and a learning experience, but I don't think the end results were that convincing (but at the time I thought they were). Many will explain that these are all necessary to get the best of digital. Others will point to products that address the underlying issues and render some of these tweaks obsolete today. Ans some will say it's all unnecessary. There's no consensus about all this.

This all started in the DIY community, so you could do things at low cost and hope to transform the sound of your system as a result...

 

[Kingrex]

It all makes sense to me.

For streaming you need to clean the whole chain. The Grimm is suppose to be nice, but your listening to music you own. Basically a CD player where you burned the songs on a hard drive.

In short you have a computer to stream to a DAC. You have quality power supplies to quality switches and routers to keep noise down. You have an external clock to reduce jitter. You have a macbook to sit in a chair and mirror the green computer to.select songs.
You have a NAS to listen to music you own. You could alsohave some music in the Innuos, but some people have more than the internal storage will hold. Technology is solving.that.

 

[audiobomber]

Computer audio is a new and unfolding pursuit for audiophiles. We started by connecting a computer or laptop to a DAC. USB was sketchy and benefitted from a USB cleaner. Then specialized small board computers were invented (microRendu, sMS-200, etc.), variously called a renderer, streamer, network player, with better sound than a general computer. Many more designs followed. Someone noticed that a switch between your router and network player improved the sound, which begat audiophile switches, starting with the EtherREGEN and blossoming from there. Power supply upgrades added to the sound quality of network gear, so more boxes. I followed the path above, now I have lots of boxes. The advantage is that I was able to build in stages, with no large outlay.

There is no DAC I am aware of that will not benefit from network upgrades. I don't believe there is any single network that can't be improved by adding a switch. I base this on net research, as well as a friend who uses a K50 and Tambaqui, with virtually the same network boxes that I use. Each box improved his system. In theory a DAC shouldn't need any upstream cleaning, but we're not there yet. Maybe someday.

 

[hopkins]

If you assume that DACs are indeed susceptible to the "quality" of the incoming signal (noise and jitter), then you also have to accept that the same components may yield different results in different systems. It's a free for all.

 

[PYP]

It all makes sense to me.

For streaming you need to clean the whole chain. The Grimm is suppose to be nice, but your listening to music you own. Basically a CD player where you burned the songs on a hard drive.

In short you have a computer to stream to a DAC. You have quality power supplies to quality switches and routers to keep noise down. You have an external clock to reduce jitter. You have a macbook to sit in a chair and mirror the green computer to.select songs.
You have a NAS to listen to music you own. You could alsohave some music in the Innuos, but some people have more than the internal storage will hold. Technology is solving.that.

95% of the time, I'm streaming music to the Grimm MU2. I don't hear much of a difference streaming vs. local storage. But I know many folks say they do or say it must be so. Some people don't like the sound of Roon. My current opinion is that Grimm has found a way to make Roon sound very good indeed as well as to minimize noise from power and from copper ethernet.

The Shunyata Denali certainly is the central factor in getting the power cleaned up (based upon my own experiments and hearing). And the Network Acoustics Muon Pro passive filter is helpful with ethernet common-mode noise. I don't know if adding a good switch would further improve my current setup (shown in my signature). When I had the MU1 streamer + Tambaqui (and no Makua preamp), as I posted above, I removed the switches and preferred it that way. When I added the Muon Pro to that setup (MU1 + MMT), there was some improvement. BTW, tried a grounding box (CAD) with that setup and there was no difference at all.

Like many others here, my goal is to have a good facsimile of a live musical performance. For me, that happens when the gear/speakers seem to disappear.

 

[Kingrex]

When I am using files on the hard drive, I can disconnect the ethernet cable and no difference. I can also turn off the wifi in my house and no difference. But can see about 15 wifi from my house so there is a lot of polution.

All the ethernet filters I have tried took the life from the music. Dark.

A good switch helped streaming.

Very much hear the softare changes in my server. Less so the hardware changes. But I am considering a new JCat card and external clock. Maybe.

I believe I will get much larger gains via the speaker and room. All the digital accessories help. But they are smaller fine tuning. My belief if you get a really big change from some part of the digital chain, you had a bottle neck piece. I hate to say that as its an open door to anyone that want to cry you need to go totally overboard as you don't know you have a bottle neck till you hear it. In my system, my digital is very close to my analog, so I figure I have it close. Thats the beauty of a second source. Sort of a test to know what is what.

 

[Tapatrick]

(Response to the thread title, not to anyone’s post in particular)
Nope. A form of madness we call ‘our hobby’.

 

[godofwealth]

What’s remarkable to me is the belief that you can “improve” the sound of streaming by tweaking the last few inches or feet in your house when the signal has traveled hundreds or thousands of miles across innumerable web servers to your house. An analogy will be useful. The quality of service — a technical term used to gauge compression of streamed media, be it video or audio, is decided by many parameters, most of which you have no control over. Think of streaming 4K via Netflix. How much control do you think you have over the quality of video sent to you by Netflix. Their algorithm optimizes for the many millions of users all wanting to stream the same content you are trying to access. If everyone is streaming House of Dragon on HBO tomorrow night, by tweaking the last few feet in your house, do you think you have much to gain?

 

[Hi-FiGuy]

Remember when it was all about "the shortest path"

 

[treitz3]

Does anyone understand the need for all of these digital components?​

It's a hit or miss. Streaming has the potential to be phenomenal, especially at higher streaming rates but sometimes the"remastered" crap sounds a lot worse than the regular CD version before remastering. Unfortunately, both Tidal and Qobuz do not always pick the best version to stream. For example, Pink Floyd. It sounds like crap streamed but when I put in physical media? It sounds refreshing and everything bounces back to where it should be.

Other songs/albums on streaming can sound unreal. With streaming, you have three factors instead of two. Not only is a selection recording dependent, it is also the offered version dependent and then bit rate dependent. Streaming only bests physical media when all three criteria are met.....and in that case? It sounds better than physical media and has the potential (key word there) to sound phenomenal.

Most times, when I am listening to an album/song streaming and I am left wanting something, I'll listen to the same song on CD or vinyl. Ah, much better. That's a case of the streaming version missing one, two or all three of the aforementioned criteria.

So, the need for components are completely situational and system dependent. That said, it completely depends on said format and ones system.

Tom

 

[audiobomber]

What’s remarkable to me is the belief that you can “improve” the sound of streaming by tweaking the last few inches or feet in your house when the signal has traveled hundreds or thousands of miles across innumerable web servers to your house.

Travelling at over 270,000 km/s, which means the Qobuz file arrives from Sweden to my home in Canada less than 0.0145 seconds later than the file from my NAS, which is 20 feet from my audio system. No one is quite sure how electricity propagates, not even physicists, who only have theories:

The Electromagnetic Universe: Part 2: On the propagation of electricity in a wire

By Dilip D James M.Sc A(mus) TCL (Lond)

medium.com

An analogy will be useful. The quality of service — a technical term used to gauge compression of streamed media, be it video or audio, is decided by many parameters, most of which you have no control over. Think of streaming 4K via Netflix. How much control do you think you have over the quality of video sent to you by Netflix. Their algorithm optimizes for the many millions of users all wanting to stream the same content you are trying to access. If everyone is streaming House of Dragon on HBO tomorrow night, by tweaking the last few feet in your house, do you think you have much to gain?

The data arrives perfectly intact, otherwise there will be ugly distortion or a dropout. Every bit sent through the network is received at my house, exactly as it was broadcast from Qobuz or Netflix, same for anyone with compatible gear. What trips up the receiver is EMI/RFI waves riding on top of the data, and the timing of the replay (jitter).

Digital noise from EMI, RFI and jitter, which messes with replay, is what audiophiles and videophiles can control via shielding, filters, switches, etc.

 

[sbo6]

LOL, yes, it's a tweaker's dream (or nightmare depending on your POV).

And it's the same with analog. Of course, you can buy an all - in one DAC / streamer / server which greatly reduces the component count. But isn't this the main objective of audiophiles - how we continually upgrade to strive for better sound to play great music?

 

[treitz3]

Does anyone understand the need for all of these digital components, that a reviewer is using? What are they all for? Are all needed? And how do they benefit the streaming setup?

Differing needs are situation dependent. They benefit the streaming rig to equal that of what you hear from a transport with a master clock. It's all about getting rid of noise...

Noise is the enemy and anything one can do to thwart it? Do so...

Again, I can not state this more clearly...it is paramount.

Tom

 

[AdamZ]

Have you ever heard jitter?
Or do you know what it sounds like?
I don't know what to listen for.
Did you have tested how much db is the Background Sound of your Living-or Listening/Music Room?
I have lived in a very rural area with little background noise for 20 years.And i´m now retired for 15 Years.
No car traffic. And the nearest town is 6 miles away.
But I am also 68 years old.
So how realistic is the idea of objectively good sound?
Or are you missing something completely different? Take a look inside yourself.
-

 

[Zeotrope]

If you have a high end, revealing system, the improvements from adding a router, better streamer, etc will absolutely be noticeable.

Remember that digital 1s and 0s are not sent down a wire. What is sent down a wire is an analog waveform which must be interpreted as 1s and 0s. Noise, timing, and interference affect this analog waveform. You hear it when it’s converted to an analog signal and amplified.

It absolutely is audible. If you actually try it with a willingness to be proven wrong and to learn, you’ll be shocked at the difference that a router can make, even if you play from local files!

 

[AudioHR]

Computer audio is a new and unfolding pursuit for audiophiles. We started by connecting a computer or laptop to a DAC. USB was sketchy and benefitted from a USB cleaner. Then specialized small board computers were invented (microRendu, sMS-200, etc.), variously called a renderer, streamer, network player, with better sound than a general computer. Many more designs followed. Someone noticed that a switch between your router and network player improved the sound, which begat audiophile switches, starting with the EtherREGEN and blossoming from there. Power supply upgrades added to the sound quality of network gear, so more boxes. I followed the path above, now I have lots of boxes. The advantage is that I was able to build in stages, with no large outlay.

There is no DAC I am aware of that will not benefit from network upgrades. I don't believe there is any single network that can't be improved by adding a switch. I base this on net research, as well as a friend who uses a K50 and Tambaqui, with virtually the same network boxes that I use. Each box improved his system. In theory a DAC shouldn't need any upstream cleaning, but we're not there yet. Maybe someday.

Ok. Haven't really explored all of this, I am a keep it simple kind of guy. Still I do remember plugging in a Audioquest dongle in my Mac's USB and it made a difference, I was inclined to think it was better.

So I upgraded to an Antipodes D something and since then have upgraded to an Antipodes S series now legacy. Digital doesn't last long before the next improvement comes along or perhaps it's just marketing, lol! The S series power supply actually made a very audible difference to my previous model, the server and player.....maybe.

Really no complaints with Antipodes. I have heard the Oladra at a friends it was a noticeable upgrade on his previous Antipodes model.

So this switch between my router and my Antipodes stuff, is it likely improve to improve the sound?

 

[godofwealth]

Travelling at over 270,000 km/s, which means the Qobuz file arrives from Sweden to my home in Canada less than 0.0145 seconds later than the file from my NAS, which is 20 feet from my audio system. No one is quite sure how electricity propagates, not even physicists, who only have theories:

The Electromagnetic Universe: Part 2: On the propagation of electricity in a wire

By Dilip D James M.Sc A(mus) TCL (Lond)

medium.com

The data arrives perfectly intact, otherwise there will be ugly distortion or a dropout. Every bit sent through the network is received at my house, exactly as it was broadcast from Qobuz or Netflix, same for anyone with compatible gear. What trips up the receiver is EMI/RFI waves riding on top of the data, and the timing of the replay (jitter).

Digital noise from EMI, RFI and jitter, which messes with replay, is what audiophiles and videophiles can control via shielding, filters, switches, etc.

Wow, have you ever streamed video from Netflix or Amazon or Hulu etc.? Did you never notice the pixelization of the video? Remarkable that you think streaming high resolution content can be done without regard for compression. Perhaps you could do some research on the Internet for video compression codecs -- this is the result of over 50 years of research in information theory without which the modern Internet would not exist. Think of the Internet as a noisy channel. This is the basic premise of Claude Shannon's information theory, the bedrock technology on which digital data transmission is based (think of it like Newton's laws of physics). The basic idea is that to transmit information over a noisy channel, you have to design a code so that if the bits are corrupted by noise, you can recover the original bits, but with a caveat. Everything depends on the level of corruption. No streaming algorithm that works in real-time could possibly ever be guaranteed to work in a bit-perfect mode. That's impossible. So, sure, if everything works perfectly, and you have an ultra-fast Internet setup and your cable modem is DOCSIS 3.1, and your router is Wifi 7 enabled, yada yada, in your house, you might have the bandwidth. But that's the last few inches vs. the many thousands of miles the signal has to travel through innumerable ISP's. There's failures that can occur at every hop.

So, these algorithms are adaptive. They try their best to recover the signal. I'll give you a concrete example. I recently "upgraded" my house wifi to Wifi 7 (Netgear Orbi 7) and also upgraded by internet to 1 gig download, and my cable model to DOCSIS 3.1 (Motorola). Great, but this technology is pretty newfangled. I have an Apple Vision Pro that I use to stream very high resolution VR movies from Apple TV. Guess what, it started to pixelate. It choked, and it spluttered, and it struggled. Not just VR movies, but also Netflix, and also Disney+ and MAX etc. What was the problem? Well, as it turns out, the Apple Vision Pro is not a Wifi 6E device (that's only on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16, and some MacBook Pros and the new Mac mini's). So, it had negotiated a lower bandwidth transmission protocol which I had to manually reset. Finally, it found the right negotiation protocol at 5 Ghz, and all is well again.

Moral of the story: in real-time content streaming, there is no such thing as bit-perfect streaming, either in video or in audio. It does not exist, and it cannot exist. Ever. What you can hope for is that under ideal circumstances, your high resolution streaming file arrives without too much damage to the content.

Read some of the vast literature on this topic, and you'll learn something. The holidays are upon us, and if you have a spare hour or two, look up video codecs and audio codecs, and read Shannon's original landmark paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", published over 60 years ago. It's still the standard for how content is streamed over the Internet.

 

[AudioHR]

Wow, have you ever streamed video from Netflix or Amazon or Hulu etc.? Did you never notice the pixelization of the video? Remarkable that you think streaming high resolution content can be done without regard for compression. Perhaps you could do some research on the Internet for video compression codecs -- this is the result of over 50 years of research in information theory without which the modern Internet would not exist. Think of the Internet as a noisy channel. This is the basic premise of Claude Shannon's information theory, the bedrock technology on which digital data transmission is based (think of it like Newton's laws of physics). The basic idea is that to transmit information over a noisy channel, you have to design a code so that if the bits are corrupted by noise, you can recover the original bits, but with a caveat. Everything depends on the level of corruption. No streaming algorithm that works in real-time could possibly ever be guaranteed to work in a bit-perfect mode. That's impossible. So, sure, if everything works perfectly, and you have an ultra-fast Internet setup and your cable modem is DOCSIS 3.1, and your router is Wifi 7 enabled, yada yada, in your house, you might have the bandwidth. But that's the last few inches vs. the many thousands of miles the signal has to travel through innumerable ISP's. There's failures that can occur at every hop.

So, these algorithms are adaptive. They try their best to recover the signal. I'll give you a concrete example. I recently "upgraded" my house wifi to Wifi 7 (Netgear Orbi 7) and also upgraded by internet to 1 gig download, and my cable model to DOCSIS 3.1 (Motorola). Great, but this technology is pretty newfangled. I have an Apple Vision Pro that I use to stream very high resolution VR movies from Apple TV. Guess what, it started to pixelate. It choked, and it spluttered, and it struggled. Not just VR movies, but also Netflix, and also Disney+ and MAX etc. What was the problem? Well, as it turns out, the Apple Vision Pro is not a Wifi 6E device (that's only on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16, and some MacBook Pros and the new Mac mini's). So, it had negotiated a lower bandwidth transmission protocol which I had to manually reset. Finally, it found the right negotiation protocol at 5 Ghz, and all is well again.

Moral of the story: in real-time content streaming, there is no such thing as bit-perfect streaming, either in video or in audio. It does not exist, and it cannot exist. Ever. What you can hope for is that under ideal circumstances, your high resolution streaming file arrives without too much damage to the content.

Read some of the vast literature on this topic, and you'll learn something. The holidays are upon us, and if you have a spare hour or two, look up video codecs and audio codecs, and read Shannon's original landmark paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", published over 60 years ago. It's still the standard for how content is streamed over the Internet.

Sounds like you have done your homework and actually understand this stuff!

Likely some one will post a yeah but you didn't consider this. I am inclined to agree with your premise though because my experience is that much of audio depends on having the ideal circumstances.