Advice for Streaming Newbies - Best Bang for Our Bucks

@jabbaman even though I am not a big fan of ASR, I find myself caught between two sides with regards to streaming. Like, a lot of people say they loved their EtherRegen, but ASR was like, "This thing does nothing." Same for some of these audiophile routers.

Higher end pieces have linear power supplies, so that should fix the "dirty power" issue. Good DACs incorporate galvanic isolation. I totally get the jitter thing and better clocks. Shit, I just paid Parts Connexion to upgrade the clock in my old Sonic Frontiers SFT-1, but good DAC’s incorporate good clocks.

I also get RMI and EFI because, in my old place, one of my speakers liked to broadcast low levels of a local radio station. I tried a whole bunch of stuff, but only thing that fixed it was an SET integrated amp. No idea why. A push/pull valve amp and SS amp both had the same issues.

I mean, I’m willing to try things, but a lot of streamers and/or DACs already have the upgraded stuff people are paying extra money to add on. And I agree ears should be the final judge, but short term memory is a terrible thing to use to determine audible changes.

I don't disagree with anything you have said. Some people have £4k network transports and £4k DACs and they need very little love in the digital chain though good clean power and a decent Ethernet cable do help. 

My entire rig is less than £2k with all the tweaks so it's a bit of apples and oranges.

For what it's worth, I love how my rig sounds!

I turned off the WiFi on my Pro-ject Stream Box S2 Ultra streamer. That was a BIG improvement in sound quality. Not too big of a surprise.

Switching from an AmazonBasics Cat 6 Ethernet cable to a $64 Supra Cat 8 Ethernet cable yielded an additional improvement that was about 60% of the improvement heard from turning off WiFi on my streamer. The amount of improvement was quite surprising to me. 

The Supra Cat 8 cables are available via eBay here with an 30-day return policy so you could plug it in and see if you hear any difference. I heard an immediate improvement to my streaming sound quality.

Great observations. I too have disabled WiFi on my network transport and have some nice quality Ethernet cables. I see Supra mentioned a lot so may well take a look in due course. 

If you are after outstanding sound quality then the key is a high quality streamer and high quality DAC. You can take inexpensive equipment and incrementally improve performance, but if you want real performance you want a carefully chosen streamer, DAC, preamp, and amp of roughly the same investment level. 
 

I have owned streaming solutions at the $1K, $2K, $3K, $5K, $10K, $20K, and $50K. If you are serious about sound you start with the best possible components and then add infrastructure enhancements… like an EtherRegen… which I added to my main system.

My advice: buy the best DAC and streamer you can possibly afford and then start thinking about tricks to get a bit more out of them.