Just to add my 2cents here, on the digital side, we are talking about ones a zeros, electrically, this is usually a one is 3.3V and a zero is 0V, CMOS technology will usually accept anything above 1.8V as a 1 and anything bellow 0.8V as a zero with that area between (0.8 to 1.8V) as undefined, where you can have the electronics define it as either a zero or a one. So it is in this area where you can get reading errors where a one will flip to a zero or vice versa.
You really need to have a lot of noise in the signal path to degrade the voltages bellow 1.8V or above 0.8V, usually this can happen when cables are long, and you have voltage drops in the line due to resistive losses, also you can get high frequency noise from the power supplies or other apliances using the same circuit, which can induce noise into your audio circuit. But all that said, unless the noise is so much you get a bit flip, if the signal gets to the DAC and even with noise, if it’s not a enough to cause a bit flip, the DAC will still read it as a one or zero that it is, so it acts as a filter and that is why the streamer doesn’t really matter if it’s 10USD or 20K USD, if it’s good enough to get the ones and zeros as ones and zeros to the DAC, you get bit perfect signal to the DAC, there cannot be a difference, because a one is a one and a zero is a zero.
After the DAC, when we are in analog territory, everything matters. that’s where noise or post-processing will make a difference. Also if the DAC and all electronics after it don’t have good isolation from noise, you can get noise induced into your analog line (DAC to speakers) so a 10 USD streamer with a a very noisy power supply might introduce noise in the analog side, but it’s a problem of the power supply, not the streamer output which is digital.
I can understand you can hear a difference, but It’s not because one streamer is “streaming” better than the other. It has to do with your analog side. I would spend money on trying to lower the analog noise, which could mean better power supply for the streamer or a DAC with better isolation.
I did see an interesting forum post of someone working with Audio-linux and Diretta protocol to try to minimize the electrical noise generated on the streamer side of things so that you avoid the noise getting to the DAC analog side.
It’s an interesting read if you have the time and it shows you don’t need a 20K USD streamer to get good results.