Glad I could stimulate a bit of discussion. So I wanted to offer an explanation as to why I think the DAC, whether internal or external, is more important than the streamer.
If you’re streaming from a service like Deezer or Tidal it’s likely the server is not even in the same country. The music is split into chunks stuffed in envelopes with your streamer’s address on and sent down ethernet cables, through a switch probably into an optical fibre backbone, through several other switches that route it towards your home, then converted back to an electrical signal at the cabinet at the end of your street (if you’re lucky), sent down a telephone cable (or a coaxial if you have Virgin cable), to your router, through WiFi or your Cat6 to your streamer.
Different chunks of music may be routed through different cities on the way and arrive out of order. Your streamer puts it all back together, collects it in a RAM buffer and then uses its own internal clock to send this to the DAC. This is amazingly efficient: even cheap £150 smart phones can download photos and documents from WiFi without errors because they have sophisticated error correction. Do you ever see pixel errors in a photo?
Now streamed music is more demanding, at 1-2 Mbits/s or higher for hi-res, but it’s still well below the bandwidth you’re paying for: though the better your broadband the more overhead the streamer will have to request missing envelopes and for them to be delivered in time for it to reassemble the music file in time to play to you uninterrupted.
The route to your streamer from the remote server is low-fi but it doesn’t matter because of the error correction. Cheap smart phones can do this perfectly and relatively cheap streamers like the Sonos Connect can to.
Where the hi-fi bit comes in is taking the bit perfect stream and converting it into an analogue signal. I agree a poor streamer could send interference down the connection to the DAC and a poor streamer’s timing could be so off that the DAC can’t make sense of it, but the point is that digital is the way of the modern world because the information transmitted is resilient to interference and can be passed bit perfect through multiple systems.
So for me, the DAC is far more important than the streamer as it is downstream from the error correction. Saying that I am moving to a ND5XS as it can handle hi-res and the Sonos Connect can’t. I’m also buying a DC1 BNC-BNC cable as the bitstream feed from the ND5XS streamer will be downstream of the error correction and therefore has to be well-looked after before feeding into my nDAC. Will my nDAc sound better than a bare ND5XS, who knows? But I do love the sound of my nDAC and can never imagine letting it go.
Are Chord DACs more sophisticated than the nDAC, probably, but hey I love the rhythm of Naim.