DDC Sound Improvements???

@stillbuyingtoys  Thanks for the link.

I don’t think I’m able to cancel just yet because they moved the arrival date from yesterday to next Wednesday. After that I can cancel and get a refund. I’ve noticed a few sellers lately, regardless of the item being sold, will immediately create a shipping label which makes Amazon think it’s shipped and causes the payment to go through. Which then you have to wait either for the actual delivery of the item to return or like in my case wait for the due date to pass to cancel the order. Such a pain. Anyway sorry for the rant and hopefully I’ll have one soon!

i also have a zen stream with a substantial LPS and denaftips iris, I would think this combo probably equals an off the shelf streamer in the 2 .5 - 3 K range. Fair assessment in your opinion? 
 

@lukaszwk  My ZS with iPowerX wasn’t quite as good as good as an Innuos ZenMini w/LPS but not on the level of the Zenith that makes me say it’s close enough to good streamers at the $2k level that I’d look to go further up on my next upgrade — something like a used Pulsar or Aurender N200 to make sure it’s a really significant upgrade.  Hope this helps. 

I asked ChatGPT if an Innuous streamer would be worth it over my node N130 with an external Teddy Pardo LPS ( I’m using the DAC in my Boulder 866) and it said I would only see a 5-10 percent improvement.  I wound love to get some thoughts on Chats assessment. 

It's hard to put a percentage on the improvement, and you have to have good-enough electronics and speakers to hear the improvement.  I went from the N130 + Teddy Pardo to an Innuos ZENith Mk3.  There was certainly no obvious global improvement.  There was improved deep bass (e.g., organ pedals, synthesizer bass), but you need good enough speakers to hear that.  There was also improved low-level detail, but you need a resolving system to hear that.  I'd say the 10% improvement is not incorrect.

@drmuso I agree that adding the LPS was a small incremental improvement.  It was audible but not significant.  The real improvements came ***in my system***, when I upgraded the ethernet cable, network switch and fiber cable, then the DDC for addiitonal filtering (check out the power supply in the U26).  But that was after sorting out the XLR and speaker cables.  Remove jumpers and running bi-wires really opened up the tweeters.

I think the entire system has to be reviewed not just singular components.  What works with my system setup may not bring the same improvements in your system for various reasons.