Importance of DAC versus streaming transport

Streaming Audio
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The problem is that frequent software updates of the streamers are both necessary and meaningful. These updates are typically non-reversible. Ideally, they should only improve the functionalities and leave the sound quality unchanged.

As a matter of fact, this is not always the case, at least according to the many reports in this forum.

Firmware upgrades on DACs without streaming platforms, on the other hand, are rare and typically reversible.

Thus, for users that value peace of mind, DACs without streaming platforms are perhaps better choices than DACs with integrated streaming platforms.

Of course, with a separated DAC + transport, one has more boxes than with an integrated streamer. But one also has more flexibility.

At the end of the day, all solutions have advantages and disadvantages and what would be the simplest and more meaningful solutions from a user’s perspective are still unavailable.

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23

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.

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24

IMHO that’s an easy yes! (my yes is in context with the newer ND5XS2/DC1/HiLine) Nice write-up on your findings! Again yes the nDAC is “old” but it really sounds fantastic, even better with a external PowerSupply.

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25

Time to pimp my Sonos port then !:slightly_smiling_face:

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27

With regard to jitter, with the NDAC reclocking, that removes any inherent jitter in the sample rate, to be fair most DACs have done this for many years now.

The consideration however is the transport clock in the SPDIF (or usb ) stream. If this transport clock jitters, then this noise energy can couple into the receiving device causing ground plane noise and other EM artefacts.
Therefore having a low jitter transport clock helps.

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28

excuse my ignorance, but how do you know if a transport clock has a low jitter? Is there a value to lookup?

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29

Curious which Sonore products you are referring to?

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Sonore specifically, microRendu 1.4 then UltraRendu(I don’t recall the version# ). Also at one time or another these additions Wyrd4Sound reclocker for Sonos/AppleAirport, Cardas DC4 cable, Ultracap LPS 1.0 then 1.2, Transparent USB Cable, iFI wallwart. When I started adding up all these individual components it was getting damn close to a Naim streamer.

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There probably is, but it will be around the stability of the sender’s transport clock, perhaps time variation . On a spectrum Analyzer one could see some of the sidebands around the fundamental (and its harmonics) from the frequency modulation caused by noise.

A paper on clocking stability and its characterisation associated with transport streams. (Telecommunications, but most of the same principles apply with SPDIF I would say.)

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32

Yep. If the Naim streamer didn’t duplicate DAC’s with my V1 that would have been the way to go initially for sure. That said, the opticalRendu was big leap forward from the micro 1.4 and I got a Roon lite model demo model for a great price. Lots of ways to steam, that’s for sure.

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33

Thanks @Simon-in-Suffolk , but unfortunately that’s beyond my understanding. I guess I was hoping for something simple like a “Transport Clock Jitter Factor” value of 1-100. Appreciate the thought though, and I’m sure someone here will understand that. :blush:

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There is no ‘factor’ that I aware of, but there are standardised ways of measuring jitter, which give a statistical measure of deviation

As you can see it’s probably Best Buy a quality transport and trust your ears instead :grinning:

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35

Yes lots of ways to stream and lots of innovation taking place with small boutique shops. The opticalRendu really looks intriguing.

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I don’t know what all the trouble everyone’s having I have a Sonos port connected to a chrome bumper and I don’t have any problems streaming from Amazon or any of the others.

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37

Running a dCS Network Bridge into my 272 was a waste of time for me.

I px-ed it for a 555DR and never looked back.

38

Then there is the important cables between the transport and DAC. I have just ordered a pair of Wave Storm BNC cables to go between my Mscaler and TT2. These are supposed to eliminate all the RFI noise between the two components. Some people use battery packs in place of power supplies, but I don’t want to mess around with those. The problem (for me) with the Naim streamers is they all have DACS on-board. If you use a seperate DAC like me (Chord), you are wasting the DAC in the (ND5XS2) for example.
I like the way the Auralic G1/2 and DCS bridge are streamers only, no wasted DAC on-board, if you use a standalone DAC. I have also been eyeballing the Simaudio Mind 2 network player, which has no on-board DAC, is made in Canada, and is half the price of the other two I listed.The dual BNC’s I have coming have 20 solid core ferrites per cable. You can also use them as a single cable, if that is all you need.

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Nor do I?

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I don’t think anyone is saying there is something wrong, I think the OP is looking to stream HiRes content and from what I understand the Sonos is limited in this respect.

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I very much like the nDAC as well, I haven’t demoed any alternative so far.

Do you mean ND5XS or ND5XS2? In the first case be aware that, as far as I can remember from posts in the old forum, the ND5XS was not considered to be a particularly good transport.

By contrast, many users have reported excellent results with the ND5XS2 as a trasport, for example against the Allo DigiOne Signature, see Nd5xs2 VS DigiOne Signature + nDac and posts by @Analogmusic who has compared the two.

42

Careful… they definitely don’t and can’t possibly stop all the RFI noise!
What they can do is add resistive impedance to any common mode HF currents flowing across the ground shield of the coax. That is all. Still worthwhile, especially if the connections terminations are causing reflections, or one ground plane has noise compared to true ground with respect to the connecting ground plane… although less significant if galvanically isolated, unless there is HF capacitive coupling across the galvanic isolation. They also help keep down any stray coupled noise, which is why I use ferrite clamps, but in such a circumstance I use a single clamp at one or both ends right by either termination.

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