I take it then you agree that “you cannot scientifically undo or silence the[ir] experience” of flat earth adherents and election deniers.
AJ
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That’s interesting! Though it doesn’t have much to do with “high end” streamers. But why is it that the monoblocks made such a difference, do you think?
We are talking about i2S launched as a balanced signal using HDMI. As far as I am aware Audio Alchemy used Mini DIN and launched it raw limiting cable lengths drastically. If that is the basis of the ASR debate I suspect they may have got it wrong.
No, they were HDMi cables and they compared performance against a PLL S/PDIF connection. I2S was no better.
More snake-oil marketing I’m afraid where it comes to claims of massively better performance from I2S.
Well no. Different things. When people thought by their experiences at the time that the earth was flat they were wrong and proven wrong. Thankfully. But I don’t judge them now with my knowledge I have today.
But so far I have not been convinced by whatever science that you can built a perfect music reproduction system. Companies are getting better and closer to the ideal. But then there are still differences and different tastes of what a good musical reproduction is. It is not a question of flat or round.
I am not convinced that the perfect streamer was built yet
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I must admit to enjoying reading the ebb and flow of this topic. I do not consider myself an Audiophile or someone who knows very much about the technical side of music software or hardware. My only contribution is a quote that I had framed behind my desk during my working life. I expect fallout and future debate 
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Nobody here scientifically undoes personal experience. You hear something or you don’t – that’s your very personal impression and only you can know if you do or don’t.
But this thread is about the objective qualities of an electronic device, i.e. a streamer, and to judge the objective qualities of such a device you cannot bring in subjective experience. On the contrary, you need to take the subjective factor out of the equation. That’s pretty basic scientific procedure when it comes to evaluating the objective performance of a device. If you’re interested in exploring the psychological facets to, in this case, an audio experience, then of course you will focus on subjective experience, but analyse it according to established protocols of data analysis. But psychology is not the topic of this thread.
Agreed. That’s the limit of objective testing, as far as measurements are concerned. You may actually prefer a certain level of distortion. Blind testing, though, will tell you if you actually prefer what you think (or hope and desire) you prefer. But this has nothing to do with the topic of this thread. Because why would a high-end streamer sound better to you than a more modestly priced one? Hardly a necessary correlation.
I’m really astonished at this advice, in a discussion about “high end” streamers. It’s the kind of misdirection an unscrupulous salesman in a dodgy audio superstore might offer.
Here’s why. A streamer is a device which transfers bits from one channel to a different one. The bits might arrive via Ethernet or WiFi or Bluetooth, and depart via USB or S/PDIF or AES or even I²S. The appropriate way to see if a streamer is more accurate than another one is to measure their bit error rate (BER). Lowest BER wins. This is an extremely well-explored area of digital communications. You measure this with test equipment, not ears.
Taking the output of a streamer and running it through a morass of DACs and preamps and amps and speakers or headphones is a sure way to obscure whatever almost certainly miniscule differences in BER might exist, and instead force the “listener” to make a “decision” based on whatever external factors their fevered imagination might come up with, blind tested or not. It certainly would be measuring something other than the quality of the streamer. Recommending “listening” to streamers is the kind of dodgy and deceptive “advice” I wouldn’t have expected from the generally knowledgeable and helpful members of this forum.
The problem here is _everything will measure zero. You will never see a bit error.
Isolated every streamer will “sound” and measure the exact same. Problem is streamers are worthless when not connected to something. I’m not saying the streamer sounds different I’m saying the DAC may (and often does) sound different with different streamers. This is why I recommend a listen. Your specific set-up… don’t be surprised if it sounds different or doesn’t.
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I’m not sure anyone has claimed i2S to be loads better. That certainly isn’t what I’m claiming. I’m just saying it isn’t a bad choice.
@Henry_McLeod I didn’t say you had claimed I2S was superior. Dig back in the thread a little… 
Rereading this a couple times I absolutely agree with you here; even if I’m one of the ones who said “listen”. When I say “listen” I really mean on your own DAC on your own set-up. Listening to a handful of streamers connected to other gear at the store you have no experience with is “deceptive” for sure. That’s not the kind of listening I was referring to. When people say they can “hear” differences in power supplies on a Pi that has nothing to do with “better bits” coming out of the Pi. They are the same bits. It has everything to do with the connected DAC being different now that a downstream device is using a a more stable power supply or you removed a SMPS off your power strip or something completely unrelated to bits now positively influencing the DAC.
It’s also why, if you’re A/B’ing something, you should really unplug the other thing. If it is power supplies that are making a difference leaving both plugged in may change the results.
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I really cannot believe that BER is the only needed measurement for I2S. I think you are missing something very important about I2S that makes it different from USB. I2S is a real-time clocked digital audio signal. USB is a packet transfer protocol.
Great quote… and I believe we call this “beginning of knowledge”, when we are on the forefront of new science, art. As in “the state of the art.”
One person running a test or two on a device or two with one set of test equipment in one lab on one day with one set of financially motivated biases is not science. Whether that person is me or the guy with the pink panthers. You can’t measure 3 or 4 properties of the I2S output of one device and then go on to make general claims about all I2S implementations.
Actually, I apologize. Clearly, “you can.” And people do. But please, do not confuse that with science.
Science is incomplete. It’s reductionistic. It’s fluid, dynamic. It’s peer reviewed. It creates hypotheses and formulates theories then goes on to test them. In science, many ideas hold only within specific frames of reference, they are not universally “true.” Often our models are just very good approximations. Specifically, speaking of electrical current as though there are electrons flowing in a wire is a good enough approximation most of the time. I’m not suggesting that “real magic” exists; but, occasionally, one needs to be aware that there are fields.
What I’d really like is a streamer with VU meters, just for the fun of it. They could show the bits per second or something, maybe with a log scale. Red backlight perhaps, so as not to lose your night vision while listening in the dark.
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With a feedback loop so bad bits, noise and so can be rejected. SQ improvements could be clearly heard. Good business idea
And that makes it a bad thing? So is ethernet. Are you going to claim that ethernet isn’t up to the task next?
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Assuming all the streamers are accurate, I’d say that the differences you’re hearing is probably various deficiencies in the other gear in the audio chain, which are exercised or not by various externalities of the set-up. A good DAC should only be paying attention to the bits coming from the streamer. When it doesn’t do that, and is affected by other externalities of the set-up, it’s a flaw.
A streamer’s function is to deliver data to a DAC. Nothing more, nothing less. Much like ethernet’s function is to deliver data to your streamer.
Data doesn’t become audio until it reaches the analogue side of your DAC.
There’s no magic here. Provided noise and jitter are controlled to well below the threshold of audibility, nothing else going on in the digital domain matters.
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I’m not disputing that you heard differences. I’m saying that the differences are probably due to deficiencies in the DAC that were differently exercised by the different streamers. Some streamers would tickle one bug, another a different one, still another none at all.
And the human factor.