Do high-end streamers make an audible difference?

[NonPlayableCharacter]

12 minutes ago, muon* said:

It's prudent to remember that many do not have the freedom of having a dedicated room, or even the freedom to install room treatments.

Edit: or even have their speakers positioned ideally.

 

But of course. It's possible on reflection that those folk would realise the futility of expecting a superlative audio experience when they make too many compromises elsewhere. A bit like putting snow-chains on a performance car in some ways, you're not setting yourself up to get the best out.

[muon*]

That doesn't exclude them from wanting to get the best result they can, in their circumstances.

[NonPlayableCharacter]

1 minute ago, muon* said:

That doesn't exclude them from wanting to get the best result they can, in their circumstances.

 

I didn't suggest that. What I said was that you will not get a better result if you have made too many compromises elsewhere. Sometimes circumstances squash aspirations.

 

If one has accepted a choke-point elsewhere in the setup, then that inhibits the maximum performance of anything in the chain before it.

[muon*]

45 minutes ago, El Tel said:

 

I didn't suggest that. What I said was that you will not get a better result if you have made too many compromises elsewhere. Sometimes circumstances squash aspirations.

 

If one has accepted a choke-point elsewhere in the setup, then that inhibits the maximum performance of anything in the chain before it.

I think those things are obvious.

 

Edit: non ideal circumstances mean non ideal results, but it does not meant It's the end of the line as improvements are still possible. Very good sound is still possible even if the circumstances are not ideal.

Edited January 27 by muon*

[NonPlayableCharacter]

5 minutes ago, muon* said:

I think those things are obvious.

 

OK, then maybe I am missing your point. No problem, I'll just move along.

[Assisi]

For the foreseeable future my speakers are set.  Same with amplifiers and DAC.  No changes.  I am not in a position nor am inclined or probably allowed to implement room treatments of the level that some other posters have undertaken.

 

The one overall critical area where I can and have achieved important benefits is the source.  All aspects of the network. The OP did not specify what was considered to be High end or what $$s where involved.  High end is a definite subjective judgment.

 

I agree that some of the Low level switches are dressed up base data components.  I have been through some of them in the past and moved on to switches designed for audio purposes.

 

A week ago, I had one streamer or player  networked connected to the DAC Via XLR.  The player was setup as a ROON End point.  I now have an identical player in the network.  The new player is setup as a ROON Core.  The new player replaced the previous ROON core. The previous core was a serious server designed for audio.  I consider that both players now in the network are reasonably serious quality. Some would consider High end.  Probably more so than anything else mentioned in this Thread.

 

I acquired the second player based on just verbal advice of the outcome and return if the outcome did not match the advice.  It took a day to settle and be powered.  The outcome of the second player has been considerably well beyond my expectations. The was no need at all to undertake a comparison. It was absolute night and day.   It is not just a question of maybe there is benefit.   In my case my answer to the OP question with this change for me is an unequivocal yes.  It possibly depends upon the degree of High end.   It is as if I now have an entirely new system.  After a short period of time, I am still finding it difficult to rationalise why the enhanced benefit.

 

An important factor in any setup is the quality of the respective streamer/player cables and power supply relative to the rest of everything in the source.  Synergy is fundamental to the outcome.  The objective is implementation of an overall equivalency and balance.

 

John

[aussievintage]

17 minutes ago, muon* said:

Very good sound is still possible even if the circumstances are not ideal.

 

I used to get very good sound from my 6 transistor radio, under the non-ideal circumstances.

[muon*]

8 minutes ago, aussievintage said:

 

I used to get very good sound from my 6 transistor radio, under the non-ideal circumstances.

Different ideas of what constitutes very good sound, obviously.

[aussievintage]

Just now, muon* said:

Different ideas of what constitutes very good sound, obviously.

 

Everything is relative, apparently.

[muon*]

I'm out

[pete_mac]

Seems like there is now a ‘cost of entry’ to being able to experiment with sources etc without being shot down… you must have a room with optimised speaker position, room treatments and DSP. 

Goodness gracious me.

 

Edited January 27 by pete_mac

[sir sanders zingmore]

9 minutes ago, pete_mac said:

Seems like there is now a ‘cost of entry’ to being able to experiment with sources etc without being shot down… you must have a room with optimised speaker position, room treatments and DSP. 

Goodness gracious me.

 

I read those posts as saying "imho it makes more sense to first attend to the things that almost certainly make a bigger difference before moving on to the next"

 

I certainly don't see anyone being shot down, please don't take it that way.

 

 

[pete_mac]

3 hours ago, sir sanders zingmore said:

I read those posts as saying "imho it makes more sense to first attend to the things that almost certainly make a bigger difference before moving on to the next"

 

I certainly don't see anyone being shot down, please don't take it that way.

 

 

Perhaps I'm reading into the tone of some of the posts too deeply and the perceived condescension is unintended. If so, I will grow a thicker skin. 

 

 

Edited January 27 by pete_mac

[NonPlayableCharacter]

18 minutes ago, pete_mac said:

 

Perhaps I'm reading into the tone of some of the posts too deeply and the perceived condescension is unintended. If so, I will grow a thicker skin. 

 

 

 

Doesn't always have to involve big costs. I used rugs, quilts and cushions plus strategically placing furniture temporarily to experiment as far as my first dabbles in room treatment.

 

Speaker positioning is a trial-and-error thing with plenty of guides as to how to go about it online.

 

In the scheme of things DSP is pretty cheap and even something like Dirac Room Correction (available on numerous amps/pre-amps and maybe some dedicated low cost DSP boxes IIRC) can do a percentage of what professionally designed installations can do in a space.

 

 

[pete_mac]

1 minute ago, El Tel said:

 

Doesn't always have to involve big costs. I used rugs, quilts and cushions plus strategically placing furniture temporarily to experiment as far as my first dabbles in room treatment.

 

Speaker positioning is a trial-and-error thing with plenty of guides as to how to go about it online.

 

In the scheme of things DSP is pretty cheap and even something like Dirac Room Correction (available on numerous amps/pre-amps and maybe some dedicated low cost DSP boxes IIRC) can do a percentage of what professionally designed installations can do in a space.

 

 

 

I'm fortunate to have a dedicated room and have already deployed room treatments. I use Dirac for my home theatre setup but this is separate to my stereo rig. However, I have no desire (nor the bank account) to throw more money at any further upgrades. I am very satisfied with my system and enjoy the recent improvements that I've achieved with my digital front end for a very modest outlay - which yielded sonic subjective improvements that I have no intention of reversing - hence my initial contribution this thread.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[NonPlayableCharacter]

7 minutes ago, pete_mac said:

 

 

I'm fortunate to have a dedicated room and have already deployed room treatments. I use Dirac for my home theatre setup but this is separate to my stereo rig. However, I have no desire (nor the bank account) to throw more money at any further upgrades. I am very satisfied with my system and enjoy the recent improvements that I've achieved with my digital front end for a very modest outlay - which yielded sonic subjective improvements that I have no intention of reversing - hence my initial contribution this thread.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All good. No judgement here whatsoever. I'm a big fan of trying to achieve great outcomes for modest outlay and was purely sharing some of those low-cost hacks to get folk started.

[The Mad Scientist]

8 hours ago, muon* said:

It's prudent to remember that many do not have the freedom of having a dedicated room, or even the freedom to install room treatments.

Edit: or even have their speakers positioned ideally.

Indeed. I have neither the first, nor the third.

 

The listening room is the lounge. Some room treatments were permitted by my wife. It was far too live, so some carefully placed panels control the worst reflections. She's not overly happy about it, but compromised for my enjoyment.

 

Speaker position is not completely ideal. They're not symmetrically located within the room due to the fireplace and two doorways and further from the front wall would be better, but they're equidistant from where I sit to listen and perfectly angled towards my seating position. Room correction can compensate to a degree for placement. Room treatments aren't always essential depending on furnishings etc. They need not be ugly, though. Many suppliers offer custom art printed panels or decorative masks for panels.

 

Like most things in life, there's usually a compromise to be found between nothing and perfection.

[POV]

The biggest single thing anyone seeking a sure fire way to improve audio system enjoyment is to bring the rt60 down (ie reduce in room reverberation).  There are many ways of achieving this and it doesn’t have to be with acoustic treatments if this is not an option for whatever reason.  I’ve seen many people work out ways of doing it in rental properties, and in shared living spaces etc.

 

Room acoustics is like all other things in this hobby, a somewhat bottomless bucket of gremlins to chase,  but I’m yet to see a single example of a system where reducing rt60 down to target range hasn’t yielded profound improvements in system enjoyment.

 

PS - added benefits that it makes the rooms a far more pleasant space to spend time generally, have conversations, relax in etc.

Edited January 27 by POV

[The Mad Scientist]

6 hours ago, pete_mac said:

Seems like there is now a ‘cost of entry’ to being able to experiment with sources etc without being shot down… you must have a room with optimised speaker position, room treatments and DSP. 

Goodness gracious me.

 

That certainly wasn't the sentiment I intended and my apologies if my tone conveyed that sentiment.

 

By far the biggest influence in any audio system is the loudspeaker and its  interaction with the room.

 

A modest effort there will yield vastly greater improvement than any source change.

 

You only have to look at a raw room measurement with a microphone to see just how bad a typical room  is.

 

The initial discussion was about "high-end" streamers. What sort of cost are we talking? Several thousand AUD/USD/€/GBP?

 

You can implement effective DSP room correction for a fraction of that cost.

 

A computer which most of us own some form of and a simple USB mic can get you started with a free download of REW. If you're a Roon user, you can add convolution filters via Muse. There are options like CamillaDSP. Also free and available on Linux, Mac and Windows. You can even run it on a Raspberry Pi.

 

It needn't cost much at all and the results are profound.

[aussievintage]

19 minutes ago, POV said:

The biggest single thing anyone seeking a sure fire way to improve audio system enjoyment is to bring the rt60 down (ie reduce in room reverberation).

 

That's interesting, as when I was young, I was surprised at how much better a portable stereo record player sounded, when I took it out of the house and played some records sitting in the open on the lawn.  Even then I was thinking that the recording already had it's built-in reverb (by the recording engineer) and didn't need the added junk from the inside of the old wooden houses back then (not even carpet).   It's also why I was surprised to see hifi amps had a reverb control at one point in history.

[The Mad Scientist]

6 minutes ago, aussievintage said:

 

That's interesting, as when I was young, I was surprised at how much better a portable stereo record player sounded, when I took it out of the house and played some records sitting in the open on the lawn.  Even then I was thinking that the recording already had it's built-in reverb (by the recording engineer) and didn't need the added junk from the inside of the old wooden houses back then (not even carpet).   It's also why I was surprised to see hifi amps had a reverb control at one point in history.

Simply standing in the middle of the room and clapping your hands can tell you a lot about the room's reverberation time. If the sound takes a very perceptible time to decay, then your RT60 is most likely too high. Between ~250 ms to ~500 ms is the ideal.

[aussievintage]

9 minutes ago, The Mad Scientist said:

Simply standing in the middle of the room and clapping your hands can tell you a lot about the room's reverberation time. If the sound takes a very perceptible time to decay, then your RT60 is most likely too high. Between ~250 ms to ~500 ms is the ideal.

 

Another thing that happened, to teach me about things like this, was playing in bands in country dance halls.   Our setup and test always involved playing a song or two,  and I loved the wet reverberation of the empty hall.  The band always sounded great.   Then later that night when the gig started, all of a sudden, things sounded dry and unexciting.  All the people in the hall (yes we used to get crowds  ) had damped it all down.   This was in the days before everything ran through a main PA that had reverb controls.

[POV]

You can absolutely over damp a room.  That’s why there’s a target range.

[NonPlayableCharacter]

58 minutes ago, POV said:

bring the rt60 down

 

Amen. I can't find any of the historical mdat files but remember that totally untreated, my listening room which is the shared kitchen/dining/lounge space is 15m by 6m give or take a few cm and 2.7m height, my RT number was around 850ms. Even just putting a rug on the wooden floor between speakers and listening position, and then piling-up some pillows and quilt on the table behind the position, then dropping the heavy Roman blinds yielded an RT that was down in the mid 500ms range.

 

Fully treated as per design from a professional acoustic engineer has yielded mid 300ms. That very cost-effective engagement (I even got him to work on speaker placements as part of the project) meant I did not spend anymore than I had to in the space to yield the results; because as per @POV's statement, you can over-damp.

 

We are way off topic now (again... sorry to be complicit in that outcome). Let's get back to streamers.

[Assisi]

1 hour ago, El Tel said:

Let's get back to streamers.

Various matters have been mentioned in this thread such as that speakers are the most important, use DSP or Room treatments etc.  To me speakers are no more important than any other part of the system.  All speakers do is reproduce the signal that they receive.    I do not do DSP now.  I have and will do so again in time.  Room treatments are not a serious option for me.

 

I only stream.  A very serious option in the overall system with streaming is the source which includes the Streamer/player. The thread is about High end.  I said previously the definition of High end is a subjective position or perceptive.  It will mean different things to different people.  A High end source is more important than the matters in the first Paragraph above and anyone who is focussed on those matters and not the source is missing an opportunity. Anyone who thinks that concentrating of these other matters will make up for a low level source will achieve very little. 

 

The source for this thread is the components, cables, importantly the streamer/player and DAC. An acquaintance of mine who is on similar journey to me says that the source is everything to him.  A significant investment in the source relative to all else will provide listening rewards and pleasure. 

 

Normally when I change or upgrade components the law of diminishing returns prevails.  There is a benefit but it is in no way commensurate with the investment.  Incremental benefit only.  With the inclusion of the second player in my network, the WEISS Man 301 R, the the outcome was an enhanced or magnified benefit that exceeded significantly expectations.

 

John

Edited January 27 by Assisi
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