hello everyone this is Amir from audio science review time for a review for exchange instead
of uh technical tutorials and uh the review product is this hello streamer if you don't
know what a streamer is uh when we started to get into computer audio we ran into a problem which is
how do you get audio from a computer to your uh stereo system and one solution is you can put the
computer next to your stereo then hook up a usb dac to it and you're in business but then you have
a dedicated computer sitting next to your audio system and it's not some most people want to do
the more typical model is excuse me is to uh have a control surface a tablet a phone or pc
and using the rich user interface on that select what you want to play and then over
network instructor device that's sitting in your stereo to do the streaming for you and that can
vary depending on architecture how you set it up and maybe i'll talk about that a little bit more
the streamers come most two com they come to the uh configurations one that is just digital
which means over ethernet receives its data stream and then it has a S/PDIF or usb or some way for
you to hook up your external dac to it and this one is actually different in that it actually has
rca output so it has an internal dac built in and the architecture of this is also unique
in that inside of it there's a raspberry pi if you don't know what raspberry pi is is single board
computers it was made for education it's a little board costs 30 40 and you can buy that board
and you can take a little sd card or micro sd card and put different operating systems on it
you then you insert that into the micro sd slot and you boot up that operand system on
that little computer it goes on a network and that becomes your uh communication environment
and there are different canned versions of that the operand system the linux operating system
uh volumio diet pie ropey these are all the different names for for them each has different
support just about all of them are free at least in the basic configuration are free
what's unique about this is that when you get those products you're on your own to
do the system integration in that you get a bare board you have to go find the case
usually you don't find a case this nice and this metal and i'm kind of cute and cool looking
this product also has a OLED display and set up menus that are customized to what you want to do
uh on a device like this you can set the dac filters and the outputs uh sp uh voltage and what
have you here's a system info i don't know if it's going to do anything right now yeah so it says
boss 2 which is the model number of this device is giving me the ip network so if you have a browser
you point it at that and you can communicate this instance is running an operating system
called diet pie and the nice thing about diet pie is that if you have the right modules in it it uh
automatically acts as an endpoint for roon player r o o r o o n which is my favorite player and uh
which means that all i've got to do is turn this on put it on the network hook up ethernet to it or
you can hook up a wi-fi dongle uh in the back and roon instantly detects it and anything i
want to play as if i'm playing on local dac i can push to this device and it will output the bits
to this over network and then this drives this internal dac and analog output comes
out that you hook up to a pair of powered speakers if you want or a standalone amplifier
of your choice and a passive speaker so it does a lot of integration for you it gives you a lot
of the pieces and moving parts um you can hook up hard disks and thumb drives and put music on
them if if your music you know fits on that and you rather have it local to this device
you can also do that and there are players on these things that let you browse that
and using the browser or some other remote app to control it so many different ways of communicating
with these things the point of this device is that it's a chameleon it gives you the hardware system
fully integrated what choice of software you want to use is up to you
again if you're a roon user best thing to do is put some image on it that supports roon
and then you don't need to learn anything new this just becomes a quick appliance and you're
done i use the roon player like i always do on my desktop or on my tablet or my phone
and everything just works but you can use other open systems many of these images come
with airplay support so you can just use any ios device that you have you can directly beam
your music to it know that the airplay is limited to 16 bits and a 44 kilo sampling so
if you try to play any high-res files it tends to butcher them not just pass them through properly
so but for cd music is fine so you can also use airplay directly out of the box
it gets discovered looks just like any other airplay device to your ios device on that so
um i won't get much more into the functionality of this but just know that it is quite cool to
have something like this um let me oh by the way there's also send me a little send me this uh
fancy power supply even though it's quite fancy looking only costs 50 extra so the base box is 149
with this becomes 109. what's nice about this thing is that it's earth chess grounding pin
is actually floating and you can choose to ground or not ground this and this can be a big help in
getting rid of ground loops that you might have in your pc um and this player itself also the
streamer also has an independent ground and you can play a bit a bit play with it uh note that you
may get hum out of the box because everything's floating and that may actually work against you so
you may need a little jumper wire that goes from this screw to that or to the rest of your system
and experiment for my situation where i'm just testing it with my analyzer out of the box i had
zero ground loop with this power supply i did also uh let me see if i can find it no i don't have it
here anymore i'll just use the standard high power 5 volt usb uh adapter also and tested in
performance essentially identical but there i got some ground loops and then once i grounded things
it all worked great so you don't have to buy this 50 one you can buy a 15 high power
usb and it needs to have the sort of this barrel type of connector not a regular usb connector
there are adapter cables that go from um usb back to this if they need it but it's better to buy one
with this but you need two or three amps of power because the uh raspberry pi is a full-blown
computer and uses fair amount of power so you need to have that in there to get it working
lots of words but reality if you buy the power supply from them hook it up just turn it on and
the thing comes alive so with that why don't we get into the performance uh of of this thing
i uh treat this as if it's a network tax so i wanted my roon player and i played my
one killer's tone as if my analyzers talk into it and uh this is the performance that we get
um the uh distortion is minus 120 db remember i've said before minus 115 is the absolute
threshold of detection for uh human uh there's nothing we cannot hear any tones lower than that
regardless so this is completely transparent as far as performance the distortion that you see in
here looks tall in in the measurement but because the bottom of it is as low as 160 or so and
so you're guaranteed that this the fidelity is just superb
um the synad which is the sum of these distortions on noise it is averages to about 113
so again right at the threshold of hearing and that lands it way up here in the as compared
to standalone decks this is a dac that's inside this little guy with a little board in there but
it is despite having all the complexity of a computer sitting right next to it the noises
that that can generate and everything is still able to spit out a sign ad that lands probably
in top 25 of all dax i've ever tested 25 30. and uh usually when you buy standalone desktop deck of
around a hundred dollars this is the performance you get and for that hundred dollars you just get
a dac you don't get a computer you don't get the networking you don't get the streaming in there so
it is wonderful to be able to have that level of performance but already integrated in the streamer
somebody else reviewed this uh hans in in Netherlands and made a remark that this sounded
good but it wasn't as good as more expensive stuff i love to measure his more expensive
stuff that he has i guarantee you this is the just superb performance is audibly transparent
don't listen to people who just seem to use dollars of money as as the rating for performance
measure it if that other device is good or better than this okay then there's technically something
better but audibly i guarantee you this is you know almost the pinnacle of the performance you
can get despite the budget class that these devices um we can measure the dynamic range
um when i measured this i actually didn't attempt to play with grounding too much and one channel
came out weaker than the other one um i didn't realize it was a grounding thing on the bottom
of this till i wouldn't test it with the other power supply i'm sure if i tested it with proper
grounding both channels would be 123 db and that'll then give you 20 21 bits of uh 20 to 21
bits of dynamic range so it's about as good as you can get state of the art is 21 so you're almost
there with state of the art and certainly well above 16 bit cd which is about 96 db
um we see some spurious uh tones in here now jitter test but their levels are at -140 again
anything below -115 is academic and this certainly is the case so it's exceptionally clean from that
point of view around my 32 tone tests for people who think you know one or two you know simple
test stones are not representative of music well this is actually more complex than music because
that's such a rich spectrum and you can see that the noise floor is about -120 worst case
and then it actually gets better and better to uh minus uh 130 or so and a couple of spikes in here
but they're just you know random spikes there i'm not worried about that so any way you skin
this you have a resolution to burn so this is well above uh certainly any cd cds 16-bit and
you need to have a world-class recording that has noise floors just good now as always you want your
source to be the cleanest because all this noise and distortion adds up you have the amplifier next
and the speaker next so it's good to start with as clean as you can and i always say that you know
great engineering doesn't cost much these days so demand great engineering you know you know we
don't have to debate how audible the distortions are when we know it's fully transparent and it
costs nothing so you're not paying a premium to have such a superb performance um a little story
about this company um when i started audio science review and i tested the first couple of products
and nobody knew about us we a tiny little um site i got a message from them saying oh you
started test things how about testing some more decks and they were making raspberry pi decks and
i said whoa you know you know what you're getting yourself into whatever our tests have to publish
and they may make it look bad and their answer was so be it if there's some wrong we want to find out
we want to fix it and it was so refreshing and turns out the performance was great they have an
audio precision analyzer like i have so they test and properly engineer their products unlike the
other guys many of the uh even high-end boutique companies who test and release things based on the
prayer that the stuff measures well and is prof you know designed well so they're also active
in the forum on audio songs review extremely good people a pleasure to work with them um
just can't say enough good things about the company no i have no relationship with
them whatsoever i'm just so satisfied to finally finally find a stream or product i can recommend
uh people in the comments keep asking me hey can you tell me how to start with a
you know low cost system and go up um to the extent you need networking and streaming
um this is where your starting point 150 if you have your own power supply otherwise up to 200
you get this and then you decide what your player strategy is what you want to use and uh
you could have a very rich system where you have you know touch screen touch screens that
you use to control your music and this can be deployed in different parts of your home it's
very cheap you can put it in multiple systems and not apologize for it and it's kind of cute in the
way it looks and everything uh but you know you're welcome to hide it too it's it's not that big
okay so i highly recommend you look into this there's a good discussion
uh on audio science review thread also about different capabilities if you're interested
so with that i will bring that video this video to an end and see you in a future one bye