That's fine if you see no need for DSD or dxd or better resolution format. But if you are spending 100k on a two channel set up, timing is very important and can be noticed, the less gaps in converting the better so for me I can hear the difference. Now if meridians new format can gives us similar result with 1/3 the file size that would be amazing. But people have been saying DSD is dead since 2011 and for 2015, sales were up 14% over the year before and many new titles were added again. Their also is dxd format which I person struggle to hear any improvement over high res DSD but it exists as well and people still buy it. If your happy with low res Sonus quality music that's fine and probably a large chunk of people are but those are not the people buying large scale hifi equipment. And this is something Linn is trying to sell with their upper tier speakers that cover themselves in curtains of your choice. Linn upper end speaker are almost always in hifi shops matched up with other vendors DACs and sometimes even other vendors preamps because you don't spend a lot of money to listen to music only through tidal or Spotify like Linn's app wants you to do. It's all a preference and everyone is happy with certain levels, I personally like DSD and for headphones or my home office with ls50 speakers, tidal lossless is fine. But with the Dave and nautilus speakers I want something more.
I hear a difference with DSD and DXD ... just not anything that's consistently
better.
And when DSD has beaten PCM, for me, it has always turned out to be down to the master not the format. Converting the same files to PCM didn't lose anything in my evaluations.
That's just me though, and since it's my money I'm spending to get results I like that's really all I care about.
The Nautilus are fabulous speakers.
I used to run a quintet of the big Meridian 8000 series speakers. Probably the most accurate reproduction I've heard in a speaker system ... but really not that musical so I stepped back to something that didn't require I buy/build my house around them and spent the difference on some fun cars.
I have a feeling you're not as familiar with Linn's offerings as you sound, though. For a start, other than not playing DSD (which isn't a big loss for me given the tiny, and mostly irrelevant, catalog - what do you do if what you want to listen is not available as DSD? Converting PCM to DSD won't get you more resolution or detail ...), you're hardly limited to low-res music or Spotify or TIDAL. Their "app" is just a control point and not even required ... the DSM units will, and are primarily designed to, pull high-resolution lossless files from a local server. TIDAL functionality is a bonus. They don't talk natively to Spotify or any other lossy service.
By design they are high-resolution DLNA/UPnP/OpenHome streamers and were the first products of their type at that level so you're badly misinformed on that level.
And their speakers with the curtains ... that's the
low-end of their Exakt line ... basically Majik Isobarik's with built in amps and crossovers. I think they're pretty comical, and that's coming from someone that used to own the conventional wood-built non-Exakt version of those speakers.
The best I've heard B&Ws 802.2 D was being driven by Linn's Exakt setup, oddly enough. I've also heard them in an all Classe system ... in which the very expensive pre-amp showed itself to be really quite the noisy little bitch. While Linn have many faults ... they make the best SMPS I've ever seen, heard or measured and their filter implementations are up there with Rob Watts and Mike Moffat.
Not that this matters much for headphone audio. I've posted in my "
Life after Yggdrasil" that Yggdrasil, at $2299 beats even Linn's highest end unit (at about 10x the price) in terms of operation as a DAC ... but that's no reason to go making things up about how their gear actually works ... you may not like the way they sound but the bulk of your comment just illustrates you simply don't know how they work or what they do (and that makes me think you've probably never heard them, either).
And I think DAVE beats Yggdrasil (but only just, and for 6 times the price) or anything that Linn offers - but it still sounds better driven off the output of a Linn streamer than it does fed natively.