antcollinet
Grand Contributor
As far as the streamer is concered, yes. My raspberry pi (which I can get for around £45 all in) acting as a streamer will sound exactly the same, into the same DAC as any other streamer at any price.It's what the dac does to the analog signal that makes all the differnce?
But as @Doodski says - pretty much all modern DACs are audibly transparent. Meaning the output is an audibly perfect (for everyone - no matter how golden the ears) representation of the input, so must by definition, sound the same.
Even those that don't quite meet that target of audible perfection for everyone, are so close as to render the differences are mostly meaningless even for the few who can hear it. They might be able to just about tell the difference in a blind test with fast switching - but it is not sufficient to make a meaningful difference to the enjoyment of music.
Obviously there will be a few that are so bad by design that no-one should touch them with a bargepole (say the last half of the red section of the chart)