SQ Comparison of 3 streamers

@lanx0003 

I just noticed that HiFI News recently reviewed thevLumin U2x, so there are Paul Miller measurements of this £9k device to compare to the Volumio.  As a reminder, his approach is to compare the jitter from a streamer using several different quality DACs, a cheap Audiquest Dragonfly, an iFi Neo, and a Mytek Brooklyn. Since the DACs have varying levels of jitter reduction engineered into their designs, you can infer how much jitter the streamer adds compared to his baseline, which is a high jitter pc setup (usb).  So here are the comparisons, in the following order, AQ, iFi, Mytek;

PC:  300/550/8  (psec)

volumio:  135/18/10

Lumin:  124/10/8

So the takeaway is that obviously the AQ has the highest level of jitter, but the level is shockingly low, and the iFi, though having lower jitter than the AQ, does the worst job of rejecting jitter from a streamer.  Finally, the Volumio and Lumin have vanishingly low levels of jitter, with such tiny differences between them that any difference you might hear in their sound almost certainly has nothing to do with jitter.

Hope that helps.  Good luck.

oops, sorry, that was a bad last takeaway, because you’re talking about the Mini, obviously not the much more expensive U2x. The mini almost certainly has higher levels of jitter than the U2x, snd while I would guess that it’s not substantially higher than the Volumio, I absolutely do not know that for sure.  

keep in mind the sound quality differences between streaming using a native streamer app, Roon, or Qobuz / Tidal Connect. Each streamer in your list may give you multiple different sonic signatures just by changing the streaming method. 

I don’t know about Roon since I don’t use it. But between the native app and QC (for example), I don’t hear any tonal shift. Did you?

What I do hear, as noted previously, is that QC sounds a bit better to my ears than all the native apps for all brands of streamers I own, except Volumio. I’m kind of hoping someone has a good explanation for it.  The internal signal processing of different apps seems to make a difference.

... in the following order, AQ, iFi, Mytek;

PC:  300/550/8  (psec)

Volumio Rivo:  135/18/10

Lumin (U2x):  124/10/8

Thank you for the information, @mdalton.  Rivo plus has improved MEMS-based (no matter what that is) clock over the standard CO in Rivo, which should provide lower jitter, better frequency stability, and less susceptibility to temperature variation and ageing.  I am not surprised if the measurements can further approach to $10k U2x.  That is certainly reflected in the listening experience.

Not to beat a dead horse, but jitter is largely a solved problem for most serious companies, so while I think it’s great that the Rivo+ improved the clock and lowered jitter further, I am virtually certain any differences in sound between Rivo and Rivo + that either of us might hear is not due to lowered jitter.  No idea about the other factors however, which is why I think this is an area of the industry where marketing hype can really get out of control.  

We haven’t even talked about your DAC btw, which is multiples more important to the sound you hear.  Look at the numbers for the Mytek vs. the iFi - 0 added jitter from any streamer, which probably means signal is reclocked.  My personal view is that signal to noise ratio, which is really easy to measure, is far more important to what you’re hearing than jitter, and one could do the exact same thing there as Paul Miller does for jitter, i.e., before and after SNR ratios to see how much noise is added by a streamer.  Miller has actually done some of that, but only episodically, so you can’t put together a comprehensive table across streamers and dacs.  A lost opportunity in my view.