SQ Comparison of 3 streamers

@mdalton  I in general agree with what you mentioned in your carefully thought-out post. For active components in a passive system, a digital transport such as a streamer has relatively limited engineering variables — mainly jitter and electrical noise — that could potentially affect perceived tonal balance.

Before returning the T8 yesterday, I tried to find any available test data that might explain why it exhibited noticeable hints of brightness compared to the Rivo+, such as the presence of sideband jitter or other artifacts that could increase perceived treble edge. However, other than factory general specifications, I couldn’t find anything conclusive.

"a custom 4N oxygen-free copper toroidal transformer and Teflon-insulated wiring achieve noise levels as low as 30μV. Further, Accusilicon AS318-B Femtosecond-accuracy clocks provide a low-jitter clock reference." To address noise, the USB, coaxial and AES/EBU digital outputs are isolated.

It is a well-engineered piece of gear that I believe is better than any other streamer around this price point, or even higher. So far, my only (positive) speculation is that it is very clean and has a darker background, which results in greater transient clarity and a sharper attack in the treble region. Ironically, however, I ended up liking it less and returned it.

@lanx0003 thanks for your detailed response.  It's much appreciated.  And you even had the upgraded power supply etc!  Maybe the T8 is the one for me but the innuos has a lot of fans as well.  Will be a while before my next upgrade but I'm keeping an eye out for when I am ready.

@gkelly I love the anecdotal comparison.  I figure maybe she doesn't have the audiophile disease that inhabits most of us (good for her 😂)

Just to throw this out there - any comparisons using the coax spdif ports on these?  I figure most of these comparisons are done with USB or I2S or AES but I can only run SPDIF for my setup right now and curious if anyone's compared them with the good ol coax port

What I don't understand that only one of the 3 has an internal DAC, then rest are just streamers without a DAC. What external DAC did you use? That would change the sound more over the streamer, did the Eversolo use it's own DAC?

I'm currently looking for a new streamer/DAC in the $1kish range, for me, only the Eversolo would work, but I don't think I want that one. 

@mswale Nope, all three of them are transports. None of them has a built-in DAC. Don’t get me wrong — the T8 is a terrific, engineering-competent streamer. It’s just not an exception to the brighter / cool Eversolo house sound.

I owned the A6 for a short while to explore a higher-end streamer before returning it. It had that same bright sound signature in streamer alone, and the overall sound quality was just so-so. In terms of overall SQ, the T8 beats the A8 based on trustworthy reviews — and that makes you wonder about the cheaper members of the Eversolo family.

I had Laiv micro dac and Topping D90 III Discrete.

Yeah, one of my frustrations is the extent to which “the industry” does not provide standardized measurements, particularly since noise (and its absence) is the only differentiator among streamers.  Paul Miller has tried to do it at HiFi News, though.  Interestingly, Stereophile. which I believe shares the same parent company, does not, and my suspicion is that there is so much money in the industry coming from streamer-centric companies (e.g., Lumin, Innuos, Auralic, Aurender, Eversolo, etc.), that it would shut off a fair percentage of current advertising revenue.  (I’m not by nature a conspiracy theory type, but I’ve had a couple email exchanges with Jim Austin at Stereophile that troubled me a bit.)

Regardless, Paul Miller’s measurements of a couple Eversolo products are intriguing:  on one hand, the Play, a budget product, measured over 300 psec of jitter, vs. 5 psec for the DMP A10.  Of course, both of these products have DACs, and you can’t tell from the published data if the source of the jitter is the streamer or the DAC, not to mention the fact that 300 psec is not bad.  And of course, as you noted, jitter is not the only source of noise involved in the nexus between a streamer and DAC.  

Finally, congrats on your selection of the Rivo+; Miller’s measurements of the cheaper Rivo indicated that its handling of noise, measured not just by jitter, but also signal to noise ratios, was state of the art, and comparable to products in the $10k - $30k range.  So it’s not really a surprise to me that you preferrred it.