Anyone heard any differences between streamers (streamer only, not DAC)? Or better yet, done any blind testing of different streamers (not using any built in DAC). I am asking about only the streamer hooked to an external dac with a high quality streaming service? Thanks.
there’s only two ways you’d find any quality difference:
* handling of over-zero - lossy compressors sometimes decompress to “over-0dB”. playback software can choose to hard clip, soft clip, or limit. will manifest as a slight difference in harshness on very loud or poorly mastered material
* source rate conversion. players might handle mixed sample rate stuff differently (44kHz source vs 96kHz core). some algorithms work better than others often at a tradeoff of end-to-end latency. manifests as slightly different phase and response behaviour above 15kHz. if you’re over 30 years old you probably can’t hear differences up there.
apart from that, for the most part numbers are numbers, everything is buffered, and if it’s digital-in-digital-out almost nothing can go wrong.