Streamers in 2023 - Discussion, Impressions, etc

Good question, I know their older discontinued model was base off of a Raspberry Pi, not sure about this one.

 

I owned the BDA-3.14 for a brief period. It's the BDA-3 DAC with a built-in BDP-π streamer.

The streamer did the job, but was nothing to write home about, usability-wise. I found the interface a bit slow but was using Roon so didn't really have to interact with it much.
The sound of the unit as a whole was great, though. This could be a testament of the solid digital implementation of the BDA-3, more so than the built-in streamer, however?

I think the BDP-3 is built around amore powerful x86 platform, so it should be snappier than the 3.14. Bryston clearly knows a thing or two about digital implementation, so I would give it a shot provided you can find one at a good price.

 

I had the original BDP-1 for a while (BNC instead of USB). I didn't keep music on it. I fed it music remotely using MinimServer. If I had kept it, I suspect it would make a great roon endpoint.

It was very good and replaced a SotM sms-200 streamer because I wanted to move away from USB. I felt it was a bit of an upgrade from the SotM.

 

There won’t be any differences as long as you stay in the digital realm. If there aren’t any extreme influences from the outside, digital is perfect.

Only when you convert to analog, things a streamer can do are starting to become important. Most DACs receive their clocking from the source (streamer) if you use optical, coax, or AES connections. A precise clock is not required for digital communications, but it makes the outcome of digital to analog conversion much better.

For most of today’s USB connections, the DAC’s clock is the one that matters. But still, it seems that good streamers can make a difference by shielding off electrical noise that will otherwise harm D/A conversion, too. Other effects like unstable USB input making it “harder” to reconstruct the digital data, thus creating EMI or whatever else inside the DAC and harming the D/A conversion, are discussed, too, but I personally don’t find those ideas very convincing.

But all this has nothing to do with the digital side of things. It takes extreme influence from the outside to really change the digital data.

 

Helping a friend who wants a good sounding dac/streamer combo up to $2,000. I have no knowledge about these, does anyone have experence and reccomdations?
best,
Josh

 

Eversolo DMP-A8 and Gustard R26 are 2 that come to mind as steamer-DAC combo below 2K.
I have not heard any of the above but both are getting traction these days.

You can also add Mojo + Poly 2

 

I spent a few hours with a friend's simple desktop rig recently. He has a Volumio Rivo (streamer only) connected to a DAC > amp chain. It comes with a premium Volumio license. This was my first time ever with such a device and even my dumbass couldn't screw this up. He has a USB SSD attached that holds his local library and streams using Quobuz.

I have been thinking about getting a Mac Mini since I am entirely macOS & iOS anyway, but for ~$1,100, the Rivo is a possibility for me.

 

https://imgur.com/a/vrX05GV

My streamer - an overclocked 3100hz RPI5 8gb - running hqplayer 5, connected to ssd for local music content, upsampling to dsd256 on the fly, with convolution fir filters routing qobuz streaming and local library music to 3 systems in different rooms in the house.

I have another rpi5 with the exact setup which I bring to work with a hidizs s9 pro plus usb dac dongle and a pair of iem