Laptop streaming vs dedicated streamer?

[tesarpa]

You don't need to trash your DAC. Try to add network transport or DDC between notebook and DAC. It can eventually replace notebook as the source, but not necessarily. It may be beneficial. But you need to try it yourself.

 

[matthia]

my question is has buying a streamer made my ddc redundant?

Yes, this seems to be the case. According to reports with the new Denafrips streamer this device seems to be superior to the DDC from the same manufacturer.

Matt

 

[sajunky]

This only give evidence about efficiency of Denafrips DDC, see my comment on the first page.


I didn't hear a case where streamer would render DI-20HE useless.

 

[wirewiggler]

I was running my Alo bridge into Denafrips Iris DDS into my Denafrips Pontus 12 Dac. I replaced the Alo with Denafrips Arse (Arse outputed I2s direct to Pontus) and it was an improvement. Then I reused the Allo and Iris into my Schiit Bitfrost 2/64 using AES big improvement from pi4 into Bitfrost USB. Was planning on upgrading Bifrost but now putting it off.

 

[ku1185]

I was running my Alo bridge into Denafrips Iris DDS into my Denafrips Pontus 12 Dac. I replaced the Alo with Denafrips Arse (Arse outputed I2s direct to Pontus) and it was an improvement. Then I reused the Allo and Iris into my Schiit Bitfrost 2/64 using AES big improvement from pi4 into Bitfrost USB. Was planning on upgrading Bifrost but now putting it off.

Denafrips has a product called Arse? As if the Ares, Ares 12th, Enyo naming convention wasn't confusing enough, now we gotta deal with Arse, Arse II, Arse 12th?

 

[sajunky]

Denafrips has a product called Arse? As if the Ares, Ares 12th, Enyo naming convention wasn't confusing enough, now we gotta deal with Arse, Arse II, Arse 12th?

Arce is a streamer. If you like Denafrips DDC's, you will like Arce too.

 

[wirewiggler]

To me the Arse streamer sounded better with its I2S into my Pontus dac. I will be upgrading to a Schiit Yggdrasil and using my Allo bridge, Since I have a Denafrips Iris dds I will compare using the Allo direct into the unisom and the DDS into the spdif port. I purchased the Yggdrasil because I can plug my Mjlonir3 I have on order into the balanced port and my preamp into the rca ports at the same time. I came to appreciate running the headphone amp direct into the dac when I ran my Ageis headphone amp into my Bifrost 2/64, to me if you can eliminate any additional circuitry you lower the possibility of coloration and noise .

 

[Trihexagonal]

Why can't you have a "dedicated" laptop as a streamer?

My dedicated mp3 player, a Thinkpad X60 running FreeBSD at 306 days uptime.

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[Buddy Shagmore]

I use a laptop for my hi-fi system for streaming. It is upper tier Yamaha/Klipsch. The Yamaha CD unit (CD-S2100) has built in DAC.
My old HP laptop just bit the dust. So I am looking to replace it with probably a Dell Inspiron 15 with Intel Core i7, 16GB ram.
I have rather high end USB cable (Audioquest) running from the laptop to the Yamaha, so, I am not going to use an ipad for this system.
My head-fi system uses an ipad to stream Tidal. Very happy with both setups.
Any other recommendations for a good laptop for streaming?

 

[matthia]

My head-fi system uses an ipad to stream Tidal. Very happy with both setups.
Any other recommendations for a good laptop for streaming?

The newer Macbooks with M chips get some great reports for streaming. Even the in-built DAC seems to have high SQ.
I will buy next spring the upcoming Macbook Air M4 for streaming via USB into DAC.