Either way the results speak for themselves, never have I heard such big differences between recordings.

Whether that’s all there is to it is hard to say, maybe the Ethernet approach has its advantages too but that seems less likely. Steve has a theory about why this might be and it comes down to the processing power of computers versus streamers, of which the latter have relatively little because in theory they don’t need it. The sonic result of this approach is pretty impressive, in musical terms it is at least on a par with a USB connected computer and gives a top notch streamer a run for its money. You don’t use the controller for the streamer at all you just press play on the computer, or you use the JRemote app on a tablet or smartphone. In effect this meant using a streamer as a network DAC because when JRiver is employed in this way all the unpacking of audio files is done in the computer, the streamer is no longer taking WAV and FLAC files onboard it’s just accepting a PCM signal and converting it to an analogue or digital output. The network that was already connecting streamers and NAS drive in my system, so ready to roll. Then Steve encouraged me to try connecting by a different route, not USB but via my Ethernet network. But I finally got around to trying it on my Mac and when used via the conventional computer output of USB I was pretty impressed, it’s not a world beater but it’s very good and this combined with the feature set make it a serious contender. JRiver has an enormous range of features and is thus daunting to geeks like me who are not fully paid up, especially when it comes to platforms that were created for Windows machines. At the time he pointed out the many features and great flexibility of this programme, explaining that it can route just about any form of internet music service to your system and be run via tablet app for maximum convenience. I met up with Steve Silberman of AudioQuest a couple of months back and as well as extolling the virtues of his Ethernet cables he showed me JRiver’s software player for the PC and Mac.

Jriver for ipad